nfi. 



'^ i - 



«< 




SPHENOPTERIS AFPINIS. 

,|l Tern of the Lower Coal Measures. 

iHestored.) 



THE 



TESTIIONY OF THE ROCKS; 



OR 



GEOLOGY m ITS BEARINGS 



TWO THEOLOGIES, NATURAL AND REVEALED, 



B T 

HUGH ]\IILLER,' 

LUTHOR OP " THE OLD RED SANDSTONE," " FOOTPRINTS OF THE 
CREATOR," ETC., ETC. 



•WITH 

MEiTORIALSJ OF THE CEATH AND CHARACTER OE THE AUTHOR. 

** Thou Shalt be in league with the stones of the field."— Job. 



BOSTON: 

GOUI. D AND LINCOr. N, 

69 WA8UINGT0N STREET. 

NEW YORK: SHELDON AND COMPANY. 

CINCINNATI: GEO. S. BLANCIIARD. 

1867. 



135 






.rttr 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1857, by 

GOULD AND LINCOLN, 

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetta 



III Exchange 
Univ. of North Caroliaa 
JAN 31 1934 



Elcvtro-Stcrcotypcd 

BY G KG. J. STILES, 

23 Congress St., Boston. 



to 



JAMES MILLER, ESQ., F.R.S.E. 



PROFESSOR OF SURGERY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH. 



My Dear Sir, 

This volume is chiefly taken up in answering, to the best 
of its autlior's knowledge and ability, the various questions which the old 
theology of Scotland has been asking for the last few years of the newest of 
the sciences. Will you pardon me the liberty I take in dedicating it to you ? 
In compliance Avith the peculiar demand of the time, that what a man knows 
of science or of art lie should freely communicate to his neighbors, we took 
the field nearly together as popular lecturers, and have at least so far resembled 
each other in our measure of success, that the same class of censors have been 
severe upon both. For while you have been condemned as a physiologist for 
asserting that the human framework, when fairly wrought during the week, is 
greatly the better for the rest of the Sabbath, 1 have been described by the 
same pen as one of the wretched class of persons who teach that geology, rightly 
understood, does not conflict with revelation. Besides, I owe it to your kind- 
ness that, when set aside by the indisposition which renders it doubtful whether 
i shall ever again address a popular audience, you enabled me creditably to 
fulfil one of my engagements by reading for me in public two of the following 
discourses, and by doing them an amount of justice on that occasion which 
could never have been done them by their author. Further, your kind atten- 



VI DEDICATION. 

tions and advice during the crisis of my illness were certainly every way suited 
to remind me of those so gratefully acknowledged by the wit of the last century, 
when he bethought him of 

" kiud Arbuthnot's aid, 
Who knew his art, but not his trade.** 

And so, though the old style of dedication has been long out of fashion, I avail 
myself of the opportunity it affords me of expressing my entire concurrence in 
your physiological views, my heartfelt gratitude for your good services and 
friendship, and my sincere respect for the disinterested part you have taken in 
the important work of elevating and informing your humbler countryfolk, — 
while at the same time maintaining professionally, with Simpson and with 
Goodsir, the reputation of that school of anatomy and medicine for which the 
Scottish capital has been long so famous. 

I am, 

My Dear Sir, 

With sincere respect and regard, 

Yours affectionately, 

HUGH MILLER. 



TO THE READER. 



Op tlie twelve following Lectures, four (the First, Second, Fifth, and Sixth) 
were delivered before the members of the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution 
(1852 and 1855). One (the Third) was read at Exeter Hall before the Young 
Men's Christian Association (1854), and the substance of two of the others (the 
Eleventh and Twelfth) at Glasgow, before the Geological Section of the British 
Association (1855). Of the five others, — written mainly to complete and impart 
a character of unity to the volume of which they form a part, — only three (the 
Fourth, Seventh, and Eighth) were addressed viva voce to popular audiences. 
The Third Lecture was published both in this country and America, and trans- 
lated into some of the Continental languages. The rest now appear in print for 
the first time. Though their writer has had certainly no reason to complain of 
the measure of favor with which the read or spoken ones have been received, 
they are perhaps all better adapted for perusal in the closet than for delivery in 
the public hall or lecture-room ; while the two concluding Lectures are mayhap 
suited to interest only geologists who, having already acquainted themselves 
with the generally ascertained facts of their science, are curious to cultivate a 
further knowledge with such new facts as in the course of discovery are from 
time to time added to the common fund. In such of the following Lectures as 
deal with but the established geologic phenomena, and owe whatever little merit 
they may possess to the inferences drawn from these, or on the conclusions based 
upon them, most of the figured illustrations, though not all, will be recognized 
as familiar : in the two concluding Lectures, on the contrary, they will be found 
to be almost entirely new. They are contributions, representative of the patient 
gleanings of years, to the geologic records of Scotland ; and exhibit, in a more 
or less i)erfect state, no inconsiderable portion of all the forms yet detected in the 
rocks of her earlier Palseozoic and Secondary floras. 

It will be seen that I adopt, in my Third and Fourth Lectures, that scheme of 
reconciliation between the Geologic and Mosaic Records which accepts the six 
days of creation as vastly extended periods ; and I have been reminded by a 
somewhat captious critic that I once held a very different view, and twitted with 
what he terms inconsistency. I certainly did once believe with Chalmers and 
with Buckland that the six days were simply natural days of twenty-four hours 
each, — that they had compressed the entire work of the existing creation, — and 
that the latest of the geologic ages was separated by a great chaotic gap from 
our own. My labors at the time as a practical geologist had been very much 



Vm TO THE READER. 

restricted to the Paljeozoic and Secondary rocks, more especially to the Old Red 
and Carboniferous Systems of the one division, and the Oolitic System of the 
other; and the long extinct organisms which I found in them certainly did not 
conflict with the view of Chalmers. All I found necessary at the time to the 
work of reconciliation was some scheme that would permit me to assign to 
the earth a high antiquity, and to regard it as the scene of many succeeding 
creations. During the last nine years, however, I have spent a few weeks every 
autumn in exploring the later formations, and acquainting myself with their 
peculiar organisms. I have traced them upwards from the raised beaches and 
old coast lines of the human period, to the brick clays, Clyde beds, and drift and 
boulder deposits of the Pleistocene era, and again from these, with the help of 
museums and collections, up through the mammaliferous crag of England, to 
its Red and its Coral crags. And the conclusion at which I have been compelled 
to arrive is, that for many long ages ere man was ushered into being, not a few 
of his humbler contemporaries of the fields and woods enjoyed life in their 
present haunts, and that for thousands of years anterior to even their appearance, 
many of the existing molluscs lived in our seas. That day during which the 
present creation came into being, and in which God, when he had made " the 
beast of the earth after his kind, and the cattle after their kind," at length 
terminated the work by moulding a creature in his own image, to whom he 
gave dominion over them all, was not a brief period of a few hours' duration, 
but extended over mayhap millenniums of centuries. No blank chaotic gap of 
death and darkness separated the creation to which man belongs from that of the 
old extinct elephant, hippopotamus, and hyaena; for familiar animals such as 
the red deer, the roe, the fox, the wild cat, and the badger, lived throughout the 
period which connected their times with our own ; and so I have been compelled 
to hold, that the days of creation were not natural, but prophetic days, and 
stretched far back into the bygone eternity. After in some degree committing 
myself to the other side, I have yielded to evidence which I found it impossible 
to resist : and such in this matter has been my inconsistency^ — an inconsistency 
of which the world has furnished examples in all the sciences, and will, I trust, 
h>. its onward progress, continue to furnish many more 

Edinburgh, December, 1856. 



[The last proofs of this preface were despatched by the Author to his printer 
only the day before that melancholy termination of his life, the details of which 
Will be found in the " Memorials " following. —Am. Publishers.] 



CONTENTS. 



VAcr 
Memorials op the Death and Character of Hugh Miller, 7 



LECTURE FIEST. 
The Pal^ontological History of Plants, • • • 33 



LECTURE SECOND. 
The Paleontological History of_Animals, , , 



LECTL^RE THIRD. 



The Two Records, Mosaic and Geological, ... 141 



'^ '.- ;^-r ;i.^; (^-^^-< .0)^^. 



LECTURE FOURTH. 
The Mosaic Vision of Creation, 179 

LECTURE FIFTH, 

Geology in its Bearings on the Two Theologies. Part I. 211 

* 

LECTLTIE SIXTH. 
Geology in its Bearings on the Two Tiikolooies. Pakt IT. Q37 



X CONTENTS. 



Page 
LECTURE SEVENTH. 

The Noachian Deluge. Part I. ...... 283 



LECTURE EIGHTH. 
The Noachian Deluge. Part II 320 



LECTURE NINTH. 
The Discoverable and the Revealed, . . . • • 3G2 



LECTURE TENTH. 

The Geology of the Anti-Geologists, . , ^ <, » 392 

LECTURE ELEVENTH. 

On the Less Known Fossil Floras of Scotland. Part I. 429 ^ 

LECTURE TWELFTH. 
On TriE L3SS Known Fossil Floras of Scotland.- Part II. 4G3. 



fist flf lllustraiicns. 



Paob 

A Restoration of Sphcnopteris affinisCFAOjUu-tpiece). 

1. The Genealogy of Tlants, , . 40 

2. Cyclopteris Hibernicus, 42 

3. Conifer of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, 43 

4. The Genealogy of Animals, 45 

6. Oldhamia antiqua (oldest known Zoophyte)^ 48 

6. ralaeochorda minor, 49 

7. Lycopodium clavatum, 51 

8. Equisetum fluviatile, 51 

9. Osmundaregalis( /ioyaZ Feni), 52 

10. Pinussylvestris (-Scoic/i F/r), 53 

11. Calamite? of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, 55 

12. Lycopodite? of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, 55 

13. Fern? of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, . . . .• . . . 56 
14 — ^19. Ferns of the Coal Measures, 53 

20. Altingia excelsa( iX'br/bZi Zsten^ Pine), 69 

21. East Indian Fern (-AsopAiTa/^errofe^jana), 60 

22. Section of Stem of Tree-Fern ( Cyathea), 60 

23—25. Lepidodendron Sternbergii, 62 

26. Calamites Mougeotii, 63 

27. Sphenophyllum dentatum, 63 

28. Sigillaria reniformis, 64 

29. Sigillaria reniformis {nat. size), 65 

30. Sigillaria pachyderma, 66 

31. Stigmaria ficoides, 67 

32. Favularia tessellata, 68 

33 Lepidodendron obovatttm, . .68 

34. Cycas revoluta, 69 

35. Zamia pungens, 69 

36. Zamia Feueonis, 69 

37. Mautcllia uidiforniis, . 70 

1 



XII LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 

Page 
SS. Equisctum columnare, 71 

39. Carpolithes conica, 72 

40. Carpolithes Bucklandii, . . . 72 

41. Acer trilobatum, • 73 

42. Ulinus Bronnii {leaf of a tree allied to the Eljn), 74 

43. Palmacites Lamanonis (a Palm of the Miocene of Aix)^ . . . .75 

44. Cyclophthalmus Bucklandii (a FossU Scorpion of the Coal Measures of Bo- 

hemia), 81 

45. Fossil Dragon-Fly, .83 

46. Cyathaxonia Dalmani, 88 

47. Glyptocrinus decadactylus, . . . « .88 

48. Calymene Blumenbacliii, 89 

49. Ortbisina Verneuili, 89 

50. Lituites comu-arietis, . . , . • . . . . . . 89 

51. liingula Lowisii, 89 

52. Port Jackson Shark ( Cestracion Phillippi), 91 

53. The Genealogy of Fishes, 93 

54. Amblypterus macropterus {a Ganoid of the Carboniferous System), . 94 

55. Lebias cephalotes { Cycloids of Aix), . 94 

56. Platax altissimus (a Ctenoid of Monte Bolca), 95 

57. Pterichthys oblongus, 98 

58. Pleuracanthus Isevissimus, 100 

59. Carcharias productus ( Cutting Tooth), ....#... 101 

60. Placodus gigas ( Crushing Teeth), 101 

61. Vespertilio Parisiensis (a Bat of the Eocene), 106 

62. Ichthyosaurus communis, 106 

63. Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus, 108 

64. Pterodactylus crassirostris, 108 

65. Chelonia Benstedi, . .109 

66. Palaeophis Toliapicus ( Ophidian of the Eocene), 110 

67. Bird-tracks of the Connecticut, 113 

68. Fossil FootjMint, 114 

69. Thylacotherium Prevosti, 117 

70. Anoplotherium commune, 120 

71. Animals of the Paris Basin, 121 

72. Dinotherium giganteum, 122 

73. Elephas primigenius ( Chreat British Elephant), 127 

74. Trogontherium Cuvieri ( G-igantic Beaver), 128 

75. Ursus spela;u8 { Cave Bear), 128 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. XIII 

Page 

76. Hyaina spelaea ( Cat'e Jfy«no), 129 

77. Asaphus caudatus, 134 

78. Orthoceras laterale, 134 

79. Spirigerina reticularis, 134 

80. AmmoDites margaritatus, 134 

81. Ammouites bisulcatus, 134 

82. lielemnitella mucronata, 134 

83. Belemnites sulcatus, . . . .134 

84. Murex alveolatus, 135 

85. Astarte Omalii, 135 

86. Balanus crassus, . . , . 136 

87. Astarte arctica, 152 

88. Tellina proxima, 152 

89. Norwegian Spruce [Abies excelsa), 153 

90. Lepidodendron Stenibergii, 164 

91. Calamites cannaeformis, 165 

92. Megatherium Cuvieri, 167 

93. Skull of Dinotherium giganteum, 168 

94. Ammonites Humphriesianus, 242 

95. Encrinites moniliformis, 243 

96. Cupressocrinus crassus, 243 

97. reutacrinus fasciculosus, 245 

98. Chamfered and Imbricated Scales, 246 

99. Scale of Holoptychius giganteus, 247 

100 Section of Scale of Holoptychius, 248 

101. Sigillaria Groeseri, 255 

102—104. Whorled Shells of the Old Red Sandstone, 256 

105. Murchisonia bigranulosa, 258 

106. Conularia ornata, . . • . 258 

107. Calico pattern (ilfa/icAesfer), 259 

108. Smithia Tengellyi, 259 

109. Apamaean Medal, 298 

110. Old Mexican Picture, ... 299 

111. Megaceros Hibemicus (JmA £/A;), 331 

112. Mylodou robustus, 346 

113. Glyptodon clavipes, 346 

114. The Geography, of Cosmas, 376 

115 The Heavens and Earth of Cosmas, 377 

110. Nummulites laevigata { Pharaoli's Beans), 421 



XIV LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 

Taoe 

117. Silurian Organism, Graptolite, etc., 431 

118. Fucoid, 4S3 

119. Fucoids, 434 

120. Plant resembling Lycopodium clavatum, , 437 

121. Parka decipiens, 449 

122. Fossil Fern [probably), 450 

123. Unnamed Fossil Plant, 4o0 

124. Cyclopterus Ilibernicus, 458 

125. New and peculiar Fern from Airdrie coal field, 464 

126. Stigmaria, 485 

127. The same, magnified, 465 

128. Stigmaria, 466 

129. Sphenopteris bifida, . . . 470 

130. Conifers? • ... 475 

131. Conifer Twigs, -476 

132. Unnamed Fossil Plant, 478 

133. Zamia,. • 479 

134. Zamia, 480 

135. Zamia of the Lias, ............ 481 

136. Zamia of the Oolite, 481 

137. Zamia resembling Z. lanceolata, ; 482 

138. Fossil Cone, . . . . 483 

139. Fossil Cone, . . 484 

140. Helmsdale Fossil Plants, 485 

141. Fossil Ferns in Helmsdale Deposits, 486 

142. Unnamed FossU Plant, 488 

143. Pecopteris obtusifolia, 489 

144. Apparent Fern {neiv\ 490 

145. Pachypteris, 4<j0 

146. Phlebopteris, 491 

147. Unnamed Fossil Plant, 492 

148. Pentagon, illustrative of Fern allies, 493 

119. Imbricated Stem, 494 

150. Fo.ssil Plant (JH"e;«75c/aZe), 495 

151. Dicotyledonous Leaf of the Oolite, 496 

152. Fern, 497 



MEMORIALS 



OF 



HUaH MILLER 



Unknown he came. He went a Mystery, — 

A mighty vessel foundered in the calm, 
Her freight half-given to the world. To die 

He longed, nor feared to meet the great " I AM.*' 
Fret not. God's mystery is solved to him. 

He quarried Truth all rough-hewn from the earth. 
And chiselled it into a perfect gem — 

A rounded Absolute. Twain at a birth — 
Science with a celestial halo crowned. 

And Heavenly Truth — God's Works by His Word illumed — 
These twain he viewed in holiest concord bound. 

Reason outsoared itself. His mind consumed 
By its volcanic fire, and frantic driven. 
He dreamed himself in hell and woke in heaven. 
Edinbukgh, December, 18SfL 



MEMORIALS 

OF THE 

DEATH AND CHARACTER OF HUGH MILLER, 



WITH AN 



ACCOUNT OF HIS FUNERAL OBSEQUIES. 



Near the end of last autumn the American publishers of 
Ilugli Miller's works received from him, through his Edinburgh 
publishers, the offer of a new work from his pen. The offer 
was accepted and a contract was at once closed. Soon the ad- 
vance sheets began to come ; and as successive portions were 
received and perused, it became more and more evident that 
the work was destined not only to extend his fame, but to 
establish for him new and special claims to the admiration 
and gratitude of mankind. In the midst of these anticipa- 
tions, and ere more than half the sheets had been received, the 
publishers and the public here were startled by the news that 
Mr. Miller had come to a violent death. The paragraph con- 
veying the intelligence was such as to leave the mind in a state 
of painful suspense. But the next steamer from Europe 
brought fuU details of the lamentable event. It appeared that 
in a momentary fit of mental aberration he had died by his 
own hand, on the night of December 23d, 1856, The cause 
was over much brain-work. He had been long and incessantly 
engaged in preparing the present work for the press, when, 
just as he had given the last touches to the eloquent, the im- 
mortal record, reason abandoned her throne, and in the brief 
interregnum, that great light of science was quenched forever. 

The event caused universal lamentation throughout the 
British Isles. It was treated as a pubhc calamity. The Brititsh 



8 MEMORIALS OF HUGH MILLER. 

press, from the London Times to the remotest provincial news- 
paper, gave expression to the general sorrow in strains of un- 
wonted eloquence ; and in so doing recounted his great services 
to the cause of science, and paid homage to his genius. 

Some of the articles which the event thus called forth have 
seemed to the American publishers worthy of preservation, 
from the authentic facts which they embody, the judgments 
which they express, and the literary excellence by which 
they are marked. They have therefore determined to print 
them in connection with this work as permanent Memorials 
of its distinguished and lamented author. 

The first piece appeared in the Edinburgh Witness of Decem- 
ber 27th, 1856, — the paper of which IVIr. IVIiller had been the 
editor from its establishment in 1840. It presents an authen- 
tic account of the circumstances attending his death, and is 
understood to be from the pen of the Kev. William Hanna, 
L.L. D., the son-in-law and biographer of Dr. Chalmers, and 
sometime editor of the North British Review. 

In the belief that nothing touching the character and memory of 
such a man can be regarded with other than the deepest interest, 
the friends of Mr. Hugh Mller have thought it due at once to 
his great name and to the cause of truth, to lay fully before the 
public a statement of the most mournful circumstances under which 
he has departed from this life. For some months past his over- 
tasked intellect had given evidence of disorder. He became the 
prey of false or exaggerated alarms. He fancied — if, indeed, it 
was a fancy — that occasionally, and for brief intervals, his faculties 
quite failed him, — that his mind broke down. He was engaged at 
this time with a treatise on the " Testimony of the Eocks," upon 
which he was putting out all his strength, — working at his top* 
most pitch of intensity. That volume wilVin a few weeks be in the 
hands of many of our readers ; and while they peruse it -with the 
saddened impression that his intellect and genius poured out their 
latest treasures in its composition, they will search through it in vain 
for the slightest evidence of feebleness or decapng power. Rather 
let us anticipate the general verdict that will be pronounced upon 
It, and speak of it as one of the ablest of all his writings. But he 
wrought at it too eagerly. Hours after midnight the light was seen 



• MEMORIALS OF HUGH MILLER. 9* 

to glimmer through the -window of that room which within the same 
eventful week was to witness the close of the volume, and the close 
of the writer's life. ' This over-working of the brain began to tell 
upon his mental health. lie had always been somewhat moodily 
apprehensive of being attacked by footpads, and had carried loaded 
firearms about his person. Latterly, having occasion sometimes to 
return to Portobello from Edinburgh at unseasonable hours, he had 
furnished himself with a revolver. But now, to all his old fears as 
to attacks upon his person, there was added an exciting and over- 
mastering impression that his house, and especially that Museum, 
the fruit of so much care, which was contained in a separate outer 
building, were exposed to the assault of burglars. He read all the 
recent stories of house robberies. He believed that one night, lately, 
an actual attempt to break in upon his Museum had been made. 
Visions of ticket-of-leave men, prowling about his premises, haunted 
him by day and by night. The revolver, which lay nightly near 
him, was not enough ; a broad-bladed dagger was kept beside it ; 
whilst behind him, at his bed head, a claymore stood ready at hand. 
A week or so ago, a new and more aggravated feature of cerebral 
disorder showed itself in sudden and singular sensations in his head. 
They came only after lengthened intervals. They did not last 
long, but were intensely violent. The terrible idea that his brain 
was deeply and hopelessly diseased, — that his mind was on the 
verge of ruin, — took hold of him, and stood out before his eye in all 
that appalling magnitude in which such an imagination as his alone 
could picture it. It was mostly at night that these wild paroxysms 
of the brain visited him ; but up till last Monday he had spoken of 
them to no one. A friend who had a long conversation with him 
on the Thursday of last week, never enjoyed an interview more, or 
remembers him in a more genial mood. On the Saturday forenoon 
another friend from Edinburgh found him in the same happy frame. 
As was his wont when with an old friend with whom he felt particu- 
larly at ease, he read or recited some favorite passages, repeating, on 
this occasion, with great emphasis, that noble prayer of John Knox,* 
wliich, he told his friend, it had been his frequent custom to repeat 
privately during the days of the Disruption. On the forenoon of 
Sunday last he worshipped in the Free Church at Portobello; 
and in the evening read a little work which had been put into his 
'lands, penning that brief notice of it which will be read with 

* ILe Trayer will be found at the end of these Memorials. 



10 MEMORIALS OF HUGH MILLER. 

melancholy Interest as his last contribution to this journal. About 
ten o'clock on JNIonday morning he took \xhat with him was an alto- 
gether unusual step. He called on Dr. Balfour, in Portobello, to 
consult him as to his state of health. " On my asking," says Dr. 
Balfour, in a communication with which we have been favored, 
" what was the matter with him, he replied, ' My brain is giving 
way. I cannot put two thoughts together to-day. I have had a 
dreadful night of it; I cannot face another such. I was impressed 
with the idea that my Museum was attacked by robbers, and that I 
had got up, put on my clothes, and gone out with a loaded pistol to 
shoot them. Immediately after that I became unconscious. How 
long that continued, I cannot say ; but when I awoke in the morn- 
ing I was trembling all over, and quite confused in my brain. On 
rising I felt as if a stiletto was suddenly, and as quickly as an electric 
shock, passed through my brain from front to back, and left a burn- 
ing sensation on the top of the brain just below the bone. So thor- 
oughly convinced was I that I must have been out through the night, 
that I examined my trousers to see if they were wet or covered with 
mud, but could find none.' He further said, — ' I may state that I 
was somewhat similarly affected through the night twice last week, 
and I examined my trousers in the morning to see if I had been out. 
Still the terrible sensations were not nearly so bad as they were last 
night ; and I may further inform you, that towards the end of last 
w^eck, while passing through the Exchange In Edinburgh, I was seized 
wnth such a giddiness that I staggered, and would, I think, have 
fallen, had I not gone into an entry, where I leaned against the 
wall, and became quite unconscious for some seconds.'" Dr. Bal- 
four stated his opinion of the case ; told him that he was over-work- 
ing hij brain, and agreed to call on him on the following day to make 
a fuller examination. Meanwhile the quick eye of affection had 
noticed that there was something wrong, and on Monday forenoon 
Mrs. Miller came up to Edinburgh to express her anxiety to Pro- 
fessor Miller, and request that he would see her husband. " I ar- 
ranged," says Professor Mller, "to meet Dr. Balfour at Shrub 
JNIount (Mr. Hugh IVIIller's house), on the afternoon of next day. 
We met accordingly at half-past three on Tuesday. He was a little 
annoyed at Mrs. Miller's having given me the trouble, as he called 
it, but received me quite In liis ordinary kind, friendly manner. 
We examined his chest and found that unusually well ; but soon 
we discovered that it was head symptoms that made him uneasy. 
lie acknowledged having been, night after night, up till very late 



MEMORIALS OF HUGH MILLER. 11 

in the morning, working hard and continuously at his new book, 
* which,' with much satisfaction, he said, ' I have finished this day/ 
He was sensible that his head had suffered in consequence, as evi- 
denced in two ways: first, occasionally he felt as if a very fine 
poignard had been suddenly passed through and through his brain. 
The pain was intense, and momentarily followed by confusion and 
giddiness, and the sense of being *very drunk,' — unable to stand or 
walk. He thought that a period of unconsciousness must have fol- 
lowed this, — a kind of swoon, — but he had never fallen. Second, 
what annoyed him most, however, was a kind of nightmare, which 
for some nights past had rendered sleep most miserable. It was no 
dream, he said ; he saw no distinct vision, and could remember noth- 
ing of what had passed accurately. It was a sense of vague and 
yet intense horror, with a conviction of being abroad in the night 
wind, and dragged through places as if by some invisible power. 
' Last night,' he said, ' I felt as if I had been ridden by a witch for 
fifty miles, and rose far more wearied in mind and body than when 
I lay down.' So strong was his conviction of having been out, that 
he had difficulty in persuading himself to the contrary, by carefully 
examining his clothes in the morning, to see if they were not wet or 
dirty; and he looked inquiringly and anxiously to his wife, asking 
if she was sure he had not been out last night, and walking in this 
disturbed trance or dream. His pulse was quiet, but tongue foul. 
The head was not hot, but he could not say it was free from pain. 
But I need not enter into professional details. Suffice it to say that 
we came to the conclusion that he was suffering from an over-worked 
mind, disordering his digestive organs, enervating his whole frame, 
and threatening serious head affection. We told him this, and en- 
joined absolute discontinuance of work, bed at eleven, light supper 
(he had all his life made that a principal meal), thinning the hair of 
the head, a warm sponging-bath at bed time, &c. To all our com- 
mands he readily promised obedience, not forgetting the discontin- 
uance of neck rubbing, to which he had unfortunately been pre- 
vailed to submit some days before. For Mly an hour we talked 
together on these and other subjects, and I left him with no appre- 
hension of impending evil, and little doubting but that a short time 
of rest and regimen would restore him to his wonted vigor." It was 
a cheerfid hour that thus was passed, and his wife and family par- 
took of the hopeful feeling with which his kind friend, Professor 
Miller, had parted with him. It was now near the dinner hour, and 
the servant entered the room to spread the table. She found Mr. 



12 MEMORIALS OF HUGH MILLER. 

Miller in the room alone. Another of the paroxysms was on him. 
His face was such a picture of horror that she shrunk in terror from 
the sight. He flung himself on the sofa, and buried his head, as if 
in agony, upon the cushion. Again, however, the vision flitted by, 
and left him in perfect health. The evening was spent quietly with 
his family. During tea he employed himself in reading aloud Cow- 
per's " Castaway," the Sonnet on Mary Unwin, and one of his more 
playful pieces, for the special pleasure of his children. Having cor- 
rected some proofs of the forthcoming volume, he went up stairs to 
his study. At the appointed hour he had taken the bath, but 
unfortunately his natural and peculiar repugnance to physic had 
induced him to leave untaken the medicine that had been prescribed. 
He had retired into his sleeping-room, — a small apartment opening 
out of his study, and which, for some time past, in consideration of 
the delicate state of his wife's health, and the irregularity of his own 
hours of study, he occupied at night alone, — and lain sometime 
upon the bed. The horrible trance, more horrible than ever, must 
have returned. All that can now be known of what followed is to 
be gathered from the facts, that next morning his body, half dressed, 
was found lying lifeless on the floor, the feet upon the study rug, the 
chest pierced with the ball of the revolver pistol, which was found 
lying in the bath that stood close by.* The deadly bullet had perfor- 
ated the left lung, grazed the heart, cut through the pulmonary 

The same revolver proved to be the instrument of death to another person, 
two days after. The circumstances are thus related in the Edinhurgh Witiiess of 
December 27 : — 

" A most melancholy event, arising out of the following circumstances, occurred 
yesterday in the shop of Mr. Thomson, gunmaker. In the beginning of July, last 
year, Mr. Hugh Miller bought a six-shot revolving chamber pistol, size of ball 
ninety-two to the pound, from the late firm of Messrs. Alexander Thomson & Son, 
guiimakers, 16 Union Place. A few days after, he called and said he thought it 
a little stiff in its workings, and got it made to revolve more readily. The pistol 
has not been seen by Mr. Thomson since then ; but in his absence a few minutes 
at dinner yesterday, Professor Miller called about twenty minutes from two, and 
asked Mr. Thomson's foreman how many of the six shots had been fired. He 
added, ' Mind, it is loaded.' The foreman, instead of removing the breech or 
chamber to examine it, had incautiously turned the pistol entire towards his own 
per«on, and lifting up the hammer with his fingers, while he counted the remain- 
ing loaded chambers, he must have slipped his fingers while the pistol was turned 
to his own head. It exploded, and the ball lodging in the angle of his right eye, 
he fell back a lifeless corpse. The pistol is a bolted one, which permits of being 
carried loaded with perfect safety. Having been wet internally, rust may have 
stopped the action of the bolt. It is a singular fact tliat Hugh Miller dropped the 
pistol into the bath, where it remained for several hours. This may account for 
the apparent incaution of Mr. Thomson's foreman." 



MEMORIALS OF HUGH MILLER. 13 

artery at Its root, and lodged in the rib in the right side. Death 
must have been instantaneous. The servant by whom the body was 
first discovered, acting with singular discretion, gave no alarm, but 
went instantly in search of the doctor and minister ; and on the 
latter the melancholy duty was devolved of breaking the fearful 
intelligence to that now broken-hearted widow, over whose bitter 
sorrow it becomes us to draw the veil. The body was lifted and 
laid upon the bed. We saw it there a few hours afterwards. The 
head lay back sideways on the pillow. There was the massive brow, 
the firm-set, manly features, we had so often looked upon admiringly, 
just as we had lately seen them, — no touch nor trace upon them of 
disease, — nothing but that overspread pallor of death to distinguish 
them from what they had been. But the expression of that counte- 
nance in death will live in our memory forever. Death by gunshot 
wounds is said to leave no trace of suffering behind ; and never was 
there a face of the dead freer from all shadow of pain, or grief, or 
conflict, than that of our dear departed friend. And as we bent 
over it, and remembered the troubled look it sometimes had in life, 
and thought what must have been the sublimely terrific expression 
that it wore at the moment when the fatal deed was done, we could 
not help thinking that It lay there to tell us, in that expression of 
unruffled, majestic repose that sat upon every feature, what we so 
assuredly believe, that the spirit had passed through a terrible torna- 
do, in which reason had been broken down ; but that It had made 
the great passage in safety, and stood looking back to us, in humble, 
grateful triumph, from the other side. 

On looking round the room in which the body had been discov- 
ered, a foHo sheet of paper was seen lying on the table. On the 
centre of the page the following lines were written, — the last which 
that pen was ever to trace : — 

" Dearest Lydia, — My brain ))ums. I must have walked ; and 
a fearful dream rises upon me. I cannot bear the horrible thought 
God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ have mercy upon me. 
Dearest Lydia, dear children, farewell. My brain burns as the rec- 
ollection grows. My dear, dear wife, farewell." 

Hugh Miller. 

What a legacy of love to a broken-hearted family ! and to us, and 
all who loved liim, how j)k'asing to observe, that in that bewildering 
hour, when the horror of that great daikness came down upon that 
2 



14 MEMORIALS OF HUGH MILLER. 

noble spirit, and some hideous, shapeless phantom overpowered it, 
and took from it even the capacity to discern the right from the 
wrong, humility, and faith, and affection, still kept their hold ; — ■ 
amid the ruins of the intellect, that tender heart remaining still un- 
broken ! These last lines remain as the surest evidence of the mys- 
terious power that laid his spirit prostrate, and of the noble elements 
of which that spirit was composed, — humble, and reverent, and lov- 
ing to the last. 

Yesterday, at the request of friends, and under the authority oi 
the Procurator-Fiscal, a post mortem examination of the body took 
place. We subjoin the result : — 

" Edinburgh, December 26, 1856. 

We hereby certify, on soul and conscience, that we have this day 

examined the body of Mr. Hugh Miller, at Shrub Mount, Portobello. 

" The cause of death we found to be a pistol-shot through the left 

side of the chest ; and this, we are satisfied, was inflicted by his own 

hand. 

" From the diseased appearances found in the brain, taken in 
connection with the history of the case, we have no doubt that the 
act was suicidal under the impulse of insanity.'* 

James Miller, W. T. Gairdner, 
A. H. Balfour, A. M. Edwards. 

We must ask to be excused from attempting any analysis of Mr. 
Miller's character and genius, or any estimate of the distinguished 
services he has rendered to literature, science, and the Christian 
faith. His loss is too heavy a one, — his removal has come upon us 
too suddenly and too awfully for mind or hand to be steady enough 
for such a task. The voice of the public press has already told what 
a place he had won for himself in the admiration and affection of 
his countrymen ; and for the delicate and tender way in which the 
manner of his departure has universally been alluded to, were wo 
permitted to speak in the name of Mr. Miller's friends, we should 
express our deepest gratitude. It is a beautiful and worthy tribute 
that his brother journalists have rendered to the memory of one who 
was a laborer along with them in elevating the talent and tone of 
our newspaper literature. 

As Free Churchmen, however, it would be unpardonable were we 
to omit all reference, at such a time as this, to what he did on behalf 
of the church of his adoption. Dr. Chalmers did not err when, self- 



MEMORTALS OF HUGH MILLER. 15 

oblivious, he spake of Mr. Miller, as he so often did, as the greatest 
Scotchman alive after Sir Walter Scott's death, and as the man who 
had done more than all others to defend and make popular through- 
out the country the non-intrusion cause. We know well what the 
mutual love and veneration was of those two great men for one 
another whilst li^ing ; and now that both are gone, — and hereafter 
we believe still more so than even now, — their two names will be 
intertwined in the grateful and admiring remembrance of the minis- 
ters and members of the Free Church. It was the high honor of the 
writer of these hurried lines to record the part taken by his vener- 
ated relative in that great ecclesiastical struggle which terminated in 
the Disruption. At that time it was matter to him of great regret 
that, as his office was that of the biographer, and not of the histo- 
rian, there did not occur those natural opportunities of speaking of 
the part taken by Mr. IVIiller in that struggle, of which he gladly 
would have availed himself And he almost wishes now that he had 
violated what appeared to him to be his duty, in order to create such 
an opportunity. He feels as if in this he had done some injustice to 
the dead, — an injustice which it would gratify him beyond measure 
if he could now in any way repair, by expressing it as his own judg- 
ment, and the judgment of the vast body of his Church, that, next 
to the writings and actings of Dr. Chalmers, the leading articles of 
Mr. Miller in this journal did more than anything else to give the 
Free Church the place it holds in the affections of so many of our 
feIlow-countr}'men. 

But Mr. Miller was far more than a Free Churchman, and did for 
the Christianity of his country and the world a far higher service 
than any wliich in that simple character and office was rendered by 
him. There was nothing in him of the spirit and temper of the sec- 
tarian. He breathed too broad an atmosphere to live and move 
within such narrow bounds. In the heat of the conffict there may 
have been too much occasionally of the partisan ; and in the pleasure 
that the sweep and stroke of his intellectual tomahawk gave to him 
who wielded it, he may have forgotten at times the pain infficted 
where it fell ; but let his writings before and after the Disruption be 
now consulted, and it will be found that it was mainly because of 
his firm belief, whether right or wrong, that the interests of vital godli- 
ness were wrapped up in it, that he took his stand, and played his 
conspicuous part, in the ecclesiastical conflict. It is well known that 
for some time past, — for reasons to which it would be altogether un- 
seasonable to allude, — he has ceased to take any active part in 



16 MEMORIALS OF HUGH MILLER. 

ecclesiastical affairs. He had retired even, in a great measure, from 
the field of general literature, to devote himself to the study of Ge- 
ology. His past labors in this department, — enough to give him a 
high and honored place among Its most distinguished cultivators, — • 
he looked upon but as his training for the great life-work he had 
marked out for himself, — the full investigation and illustration of the 
Geology of Scotland. He had large materials already collected for 
this work ; and it was his intention, after completing that volume 
which has happily been left in so finished a state, to set himself to 
their arrangement. The friends of science in many lands will moiirn 
over the incompleted project which, however ably It may hereafter 
be accomplished by another, it were vain to hope shall ever be so 
accomplished as it should have been by one who united in himself the 
power of accurate observation, of logical deduction, of broad gen- 
eralization, and of pictorial and poetic representation. But the 
friends of Christianity cannot regret, that since It was the mysteri- 
ous decree of Heaven that he should prematurely fall, — his work 
as a pure Geologist not half done, — he should have been led aside 
by the publication of the Vestiges of Creation to that track of semi- 
theological, semi-scientific research to which his later studies and 
later writings have been devoted. That, as it now seems to us, was 
the great work which it was given him on earth to do, — to illustrate 
the perfect harmony of all that science tells us of the physical struc- 
ture and history of our globe, with all that the Bible tells of the 
creation and government of this earth by and through Chiist Jesus 
our Lord. The establishment and exhibition of that harmony was a 
task to which is it too much to say that there was no man living so 
competent as he ? We leave it to the future to declare how much 
he has done by his writings to fulfil that task ; but mourning, as we 
now can only do, over his sad and melancholy death, — to that very 
death, with all the tragic circumstances that surround It, we would 
point as the closing sacrifice offered on the altar of our faith. His 
very intellect, his reason, — God's most precious gift, — a gift dearer 
than life, — perished in the great endeavor to harmonize the works 
and word of the Eternal. A most Inscrutable event, that such an 
intellect should have been suffered to go to wreck through too eager 
a prosecution of such a work. But amid the mystery, which we 
cannot penetrate, our love, and our veneration, and our gratitude, 
toward that so highly gifted and truly Christian man shall only grow 
the deeper because of the cloud and the whirlwind in which he has 
been borne off from our side. 



MEMORIALS OF HUGH MILLER. 17 

On the 31st of December, two days after the obsequies 
had been performed, Dr. Hanna resumed the subject in the fol- 
lowing elevated strain : 

We have still but little heart to dilate on any pohtical or literary 
topic. Our thoughts can dwell on but one thrice melancholy event. 
Need we name that event ? Alas, no ! It had occurred but a few 
hours when the tidings of it struck our city with stunning, stupefying, 
and deeply saddening blow. It has already thrilled our whole land ; 
and is on its way, through a hundred channels, to the west, to the 
east, and to the south, carrying with it mourning and lamentation 
throughout the vast area which is covered by the language in which 
Hugh Jkliller wrote. Writing, as it were, amid the deep shadows of 
the funeral chamber, and brought in a manner into the very pres- 
ence of the dead, we are made strongly to feel, and we daresay our 
readers to a large extent will feel, too, the nothingness of those dis- 
cussions which usually occupy and engross men. The weightier^ 
matter that ever occupied the wisdom of cabinet or the pen of jour- 
nalist appears verily but fleeting and transitory, when brought thus 
into prominent contrast with the awful reahties of human existence 
and destiny ; and it is only when reflection shows us that these mat- 
ters are yet parts of a grand Pro\'idential scheme, embracing man's 
happiness now, and entering deeply into the question of his future 
and eternal well-being, that we can see in them that amount of sig- 
nificance and importance which they really possess. 

From the firmament of British literature and science a great light 
has departed. But yesterday we rejoiced in its beams, and now it 
has set all suddenly and forever ; and to us there remains but the 
melancholy task of bewalHng its departure, and tracing very hastily 
and imperfectly its track. The intellectual powers of Hugh Miller 
had certainly not declined. He was marked to the very last by that 
wonderful robustness of mind which had characterized him all 
through life. His sense was as manly, his judgment as sound and 
comprehensive, his penetration as discriminating and deep, his im- 
agination as \'igorous and bold, and his taste as pure and trusty, as 
they had ever been. The whole of his great powers were found 
working together up to the last week of his earthly career, with their 
usually calm, noiseless strength, and finely balanced and exquisitely 
toned harmony. We have evidence of this fact under his own hand 
in recent numbers of the Witness. His last two articles were, the 
one on Russia, and the other on our modern poets. The former, — 
2* 



1« MEMORIALS OF HUGH MILLER. 

that on the resources of the Kussian empire, — is characterized by 
the same wide range of thinking, the same skill in analysis, and the 
same power of grouping and arranging details, and making them to 
throw Hght on some great principle, which usually marked and noti- 
fied his hand when employed on such subjects. The latter, — that 
on the poets, — is rich and genial as usual, betokening a full and 
unclouded recollection of all his early reading in that department of 
our literature, abounding in the finest touches of pathos and beauty, 
and redolent with a most generous sympathy with kindred genius. 
It is not inconsistent with what we have now stated, and it is the fact, 
that latterly the inroads of disease, which had entrenched itself deep- 
ly in a constitution originally strong, and which kept steadily ad- 
vancing upon the vital powers, had come so near the seat of the 
mind, that for short intervals the noble spirit was sadly beclouded, 
and its moral and intellectual action momentarily suspended. But, 
apart from this, there seemed ground to believe that there was yet 
before Mr. Miller much honorable and nob^e labor. The strong 
man, after all his tasks, appeared to be still strong. His powers 
were mellowing into richness and calm, matured strength ; his con- 
ceptions of great principles were growing yet wider ; his store of 
facts, literary as well as scientific, was accumulating -with every busy 
and laborious year that passed over him ; and there did seem ground 
to expect from his pen, unrivalled among his contemporaries in its 
exquisite purity and calm power, many a deep thoughted article, and 
many a profoundly reasoned and richly illustrated volume. We 
looked to him for the solution of many a dark question in science ; 
and we certainly hoped, from that fine union of science and theol- 
ogy which dwelt in him above all men, for a yet fuller and more 
complete adjustment of the two great records of Creation, — that of 
the Kocks, and that of Moses. But alas ! all these hopes have sud- 
denly failed us. It seemed right otherwise to the Great Disposer of 
all. He has said to his faithfiil servant, " Enough." 

Let us look back upon that work. We by no means aim at giving 
a calm, well weighed, and deeply pondered estimate of it, but only 
such a glance as the circumstances permit and require. His great 
and special work was his advocacy of the principles of the Free 
Church. Mr. Miller was par excellence the popular expounder and 
defender of these principles, whether in their embryotic state in the 
Non-Intrusion party, or as embodied in the fully developed and 
completely emancipated Free Protesting Church of Scotland. For 
this service, in connection with which he would have best liked to be 



MEMORIALS OF HUGH MILLER. 19 

remembered, as he best deserved It, he had unconsciously been un- 
dergoing a course of preparation even when a boy. He himself has 
told us with what eagerness he devoured, at that period of life, the 
legendary histories of Wallace and Bruce ; and the occupation had 
its use. It gave him a capacity for admiring what was great though 
perilous in exploit, and for truly and largely sympathizing with what 
was patriotic and self-sacrificing in character ; and so it created a 
groundwork for his own future thinking and acting. The admira- 
tion he then bore to these earliest of our " Scottish Worthies," who 
vindicated on Bannockburn, and kindred fields, Scotland's right to 
be an independent and free country, he afterwards transferred to 
our later " Worthies," whom he revered as greater still. Not that he 
ever lost his admiration of the former, or ceased to value the incal- 
culable services they rendered to the Scottish nation ; but that he 
regarded Knox and Melville as men occupying a yet higher plat^ 
form, — as gifted with a yet deeper insight into their country's 
wants, — as, in short, carrying forward and consunmiating the glo- 
rious'task which Wallace and Bruce had but begun. He saw that 
unless our reformers had come after our heroes, planting schools, 
founding colleges, and, above all, imparting to their countrymen a 
scriptural and rational faith, in vain had Bruce unsheathed his 
sword, — in vain had ^^^llace laid down his life. Wallace and 
Bruce had created an independent country ; Knox and Melville had 
created an independent people. They were the creators of the Scot- 
tish nation, — the real enfranchisers of our people ; and it was this 
that taught Mr. ]\Iiller to venerate these men so profoundly, and that 
made him in his inmost soul a devoted follower, and to the utmost 
extent of his great faculties a defender, of their cause. He was a 
soldier from love, — pure, heroic, chivalrous devotion soaring infi- 
nitely above the partisan. He saw that the Church of Scotland 
was the creator of the rights and privileges of the people of Scot- 
land, — that she was the grand palladium of the country's liberties, — 
that while she stood an independent and free institution, the people 
stood an independent and free nation, — and that bonds to her meant 
slavery to them. Therefore did he gird on the sword when he saw 
peril gathering around her. The privileges, — the entire standing 
of the common people, as given them by the Reformation, — he saw 
to be in danger : he was " one of themselves ; " and he felt and 
fought as if almost the quarrel had been a personal one, and the 
question at issue his own liberty or slavery. How richly equipped 
and nobly armed he came into the field, we need not here state. 



20 MEMORIALS OF HUGH MILLER. 

What fulness yet precision of ecclesiastical lore, — what strength 
and conclusiveness of argument, — what flashes of humor, wit, and 
sarcasm, — and in what a luminous yet profoundly philosophical 
light did he set the great principles involved in the controversy, 
making them patent in the very cottages of our land, and so fixing 
them in the understandings of the very humblest of our people, that 
they never afterwards could be either misunderstood or forgotten ! 
It was thus that the way was prepared for the great result of the 
18th of May, 1843. 

Of Mr. Miller, as a man of science and a public journalist, we 
cannot speak at present at any length. In him the love of science 
was deeply seated and early developed. The first arena on which 
he appeared — obscure and humble as it was — afforded him special 
opportunities of initiating himself into what to him was then, and 
continued ever afterwards to be, a most fascinating study. The study 
of geology was eagerly prosecuted amid the multifarious duties, and 
during the brief pauses, of a busy life. Several original discoveries 
rewarded his patient and laborious investigations. He succeeded at 
length in placing his name in the first rank of British scientific think- 
ers and writers. His works are characterized by a fine union of 
strict science, classic diction, and enchanting description, which rises 
not unfrequently into the loftiest vein of poetry. The fruits of his 
researches were ever made to bear upon the defence and elucidation 
of the Oracles of Truth. Our common Christianity owes much to 
his pen. Viewing him as a journalist, Mr. IVIiller not only excelled 
in article writing, — the most difficult of all kinds of composition, — 
but, as will be generally admitted, he has introduced a new era into 
newspaper writing. If the moral tone of our newspaper press is 
higher now than it was twenty-five years ago, we have Mr. Miller in 
large degree to thank for it ; and to him, too, is to be traced that 
purer style and more philosophic spirit which begins to be discern- 
ible in the columns of our public journals. 

But the character in which his personal friends will deplore him 
most, and will most frequently recall his memory, will be that of the 
man. How meek and gentle he was ! — how unpretending and mod- 
est, even as a very child! — how true and steady in friendship! — 
how wise and playful his mirth ! — how ripened and chastened his 
wisdom ! — how ready to counsel ! — how willing to oblige ! — how 
generous and large his sympathies ! No little jealousies, no fretful 
cnvyings, had he ! Even in opposition, how noble and manly was 
be : if a powerful, he was a fair and open antagonist ; and whatever 



MEMORIALS OF HUGH MILLER. 21 

hard blows were dealt, they were dealt in his own journal. We 
have seen hira in various moods and in all circumstances ; but never 
did we hear him utter an unkind or disparaging word of man. He 
was, too, a sincere and humble Christian ; and the lively faith which 
he cherished in the adorable Redeemer and his all-efficacious sacri- 
fice, bore abundantly its good fruits in a Hfe including no ordinary 
variety of condition and trial, and running on to such term as to 
make abundantly manifest what manner of man he was. 

The article which follows is from the Edinburgh News, It 
is evidently from the pen of one who was intimately acquainted 
with Hugh Miller, and is worthy of attention, not only for its 
eloquent and discriminating notices of his works, but also for 
its statements respecting his great designs, never, alas, to be 
accomplished. 

It is not many months since we chronicled the death of the great- 
est of living Scotsmen, and the prince of modern philosophers — 
Sir William Hamilton. These last few days have bereft us of an- 
other of our countrymen not less illustrious, and known all over the 
world as one of the princes of geology. We cannot well estimate 
the loss which society sustains in the death of IVlr. Miller. He occu- 
piBd a foremost place among us, and there is none on whom his man- 
tle can fall. In the world of letters his name takes high rank, for 
undoubtedly he was one of the ablest writers in our literature. 
Who can have read without delight his manly, vigorous language, 
soaring sometimes into the highest eloquence, anon plunging into 
the depths of metaphysical argument, or grappling with the dry tech- 
nicalities of science, yet ever rolling along with the same easy, on- 
ward flow ? His style has all the charm of Goldsmith's sweetness, 
with the infusion of a rich vigor that gives it an air of great origi- 
nality. He is one of the few writers who have successfully conjoined 
the graces of literature with the formal details of science, and whoso 
works are perused for their literary excellences, independently al- 
together of their scientific merit. His writings will ever be regarded 
among the classics of the English language. For obvious reasons 
we pass over his editorial labors. It is on the republic of science 
that his death will fall most heavily. There can be Httle doubt that 
he has done more to popularize his favorite department than any 
©ther writer Of all geological works, his enjoy, perhaps, the widest 



22 MEMORIALS OF HUGH MILLER. 

circulation — not in this country, merely, but all over the world, and 
especially in the United States. His reputation, however, does not 
rest solely on his standing as an exponent of science to the people ; 
he was himself an original and accurate observer. When the infant 
science of geology was battling for existence against the opposing 
phalanx of united Christendom, Hugh Miller, then a mere lad, was 
quietly working as a stone-mason in the north of Scotland, and em- 
ploying his leisure time among the fossil fishes of the Old Red Sand- 
stone, and the ammonites and the belemnites of the Lias, that 
abound in the neighborhood of Cromarty. As years rolled slowly 
away, he continued his observations, and when at length, in 1841, 
the results were given to the world in his well known " Old Red 
Sandstone," every one was charmed with the novelty and beauty of 
the style, and his reputation as a writer was at once established. 
Men of science, however, though acknowledging the graphic and 
elegant diction of his descriptions, had some doubts as to their truth- 
fulness. Indeed, by some geologists they were cast aside as fanciful, 
and other restorations of the Old Red fishes were proposed and 
adopted. Those who are acquainted with Old Red ichthyolites, 
or who have had the pleasure of examining the exquisite series in Mr. 
Miller's collection, may well smile at the absurdity of the restora- 
tions that were adopted. Yet some of these found their way into a 
work of no little popularity, — MantelPs " Medals of Creation." It 
is sufficient to state that the drawings there given bear no resem- 
blance to anything in the heavens above or on the earth beneath, or 
in the waters under the earth, nor to any fossil organism that has 
ever been discovered. At length the progress of investigation led 
to the discarding of these monstrosities, and Miller's restorations 
were returned to, as, after all, the true ones. " The Old Red Sand- 
stone " formed an era in the history of fossil geology. That forma- 
tion had hitherto been regarded as well nigh barren of organic 
remains ; but Mr. Miller demonstrated that it contains at least three 
successive stages, each characterized by a suite of uncouth and hith- 
erto unknown fishes. A few years later he published his " Foot- 
prints of the Creator." This is undoubtedly his chef-d'oeuvre^ exhibit- 
ing, as it does, the full powers of his massive intellect and his poetic 
imagination. As a piece of scientific investigation and research, it 
is of a very high order ; as a reply to the crudities of the develop- 
ment theory, it is unanswerable ; and as a contribution to our phys- 
ico-theological literature, it ranks, with Chalmers' " Astronomical 
Lectures," among the finest in this or any other language. Some 



MEMORIALS OF HUGH MILLER. 23 

of the ideas are as profound as they are original, opening up a new 
field of thought, which it was doubtless the intention of the deceased 
himself to cultivate. His published works, however, contain but a 
fraction of the labors of his lifetime. For many years past he has 
been one of the most energetic members of the Royal Physical So- 
ciety, at whose meetings he from time to time made known the prog- 
ress of his researches. Were these papers collected, they would form 
several goodly volumes. But their author studiously refrained from 
publishing them, save occasionally in the columns of the Witness 
newspaper. It was his intention that they should each form a part 
of the great work of his life, to which for many years his leisure 
moments had been devoted. His design was to combine the results 
of all his labors among the different rock formations of Scotland into 
one grand picture of the geological history of our country. For this 
end he had explored a large part of the Scottish counties, anxious that 
his statements should rest as far as possible upon the authority of his 
own personal investigations. His knowledge of the geology of the 
country was thus far more extensive than was generally supposed. 
We may refer particularly to that branch of it on which he bestowed 
the unremitted attention of his closing years, — the palseontological 
history of the glacial beds, — that strange and as yet almost unknown 
period that ushered in the existing creation. He studied it minutely 
along the shores of the Moray Frith, on the east coast of Scotland, 
along the shores of Fife and the Lothians, and on the coast of Ayr- 
shire and the Frith of Clyde. This last summer he made a tour 
through the centre of the island, and obtained boreal shells at Buch- 
lyvie in Stirlingshire, — the omphalos of Scotland. The importance 
of this discovery, in connection with those he had previously made 
in following out the same chain of evidence, can only be appreciated 
by those who have paid some attention to geology. We may state 
briefly that it proves the central area of Scotland to have been sub- 
merged beneath an icy sea, and icebergs to have grated along over 
what is now the busy valley of the Forth and Clyde, while the 
waters were tenanted by shells at present found only in the Northern 
Ocean. A large part of his work is written, though it is to be feared 
that much knowledge, amassed in the course of its preparation, has 
perished -vvith him. In particular, there were whole sections of his 
Museum understood only by himself. Every little fragment had its 
story, and contributed its quota of evidence to the truth of his 
descriptions. There is, perhaps, but another mind in Britain, — 
that of Sir Philip Egerton, — that can catch up the thread, and read 



24 MEMORIALS OF HUGH MILLER. 

off, though with difficulty, the meaning of those carefully arranged 
fragments. Yet, even with such aid, much must long, If not forever, 
remain dark and obscure. The work on which he was more Imme- 
diately engaged at the time of his death was partly theological, partly 
scientific. It was to embrace the substance of some lectures lately 
delivered, and a paper read last year before the British Association 
at Glasgow on the fossil plants collected by himself from the Oolite 
and Old Red Sandstone of Scotland. It was likewise to contain the 
figures of some thirty or forty hitherto undescribed species of vege- 
tables. We hope that, as It was all but ready for publication, it may 
yet be given to the world. 

The name of Hugh Miller will ever stand forth as synonymous 
with all that is honest and manly ; as the impersonation of moral 
courage and indomitable energy ; as the true ideal of a self-educated 
man. From the humblest sphere of life, and from the toils of a 
stone-mason's apprentice, without means, without friends, without 
other than the most rudimentary education, he rose, by his own 
unaided and unwearied exertions, to fill one of the brightest pages 
In the annals of our country. And when, in future years, an exam- 
ple is sought of unconquerable perseverance, of fearless integrity, 
and of earnest, ceaseless activity, the voice of universal approbation 
shall proclaim — '■'■ the stone-mason of Cromurty." We have spoken 
of this mournful event only as a public calamity ; yet, to those who 
were personally acquainted with the departed, it is invested with no 
ordinary sadness. Long, long shall they remember the playful fancy, 
the rich humor, the warm, genial heart of their friend. His simple, 
open frankness endeared him to every one, though his retiring dis- 
position prevented him from making many intimate friendships. To 
those who enjoyed this higher privilege, his death must have caused 
the most poignant regret. Yet what can even their sorrow be to 
that of the relatives of the departed ? We lament the death of one 
who was alike an honor to his profession, to literature, to science, 
and to his country, — one of the most loved and cherished of friends. 
Let us not forget to mingle our sympathy and our sorrow with that 
deeper grief that mourns the loss of a husband and a father. 

As coming from a different quarter, and presenting a some- 
what different view, the following, from the London Literary 
Gazette, should have a place here. 

Hugh Miller was born at Cromarty in 1805. In his early life he 
worked as a laborer in the Sandstone quarries in his native district, 



MEMORIALS OF HUGH MILLER. 25 

and afterwards as a stone-mason In different parts of Scotland. In 
a work published in 1854, "My Schools and Schoolmasters, or the 
story of my Education," Mr. Miller gives a most interesting account 
of bis early history, and of the training and selinjulture by which he 
rose to honorable rank in literature and science. Notwithstanding 
*he unpretending statements of this narrative, and the disavowal of 
iny other elements of success than are within ordinary reach, every 
reader of that book feels that homage is due to a genius original and 
rare, as well as to natural talents diligently and judiciously cultivated. 
While professedly written for the benefit of the working classes of 
his own country, there are few who may not derive pleasant and 
profitable lessons from this most remarkable piece of autobiography. 
After being engaged in manual labor for about fifteen years, Mr. 
Miller was for some time manager of a bank that was established in 
his native town. AVhile in this position, a pamphlet that he pub- 
lished, on the ecclesiastical controversies which then distracted Scot- 
land, attracted the attention of the leaders of the party who now 
form the Free Church, and they invited him to be editor of the 
Witness newspaper, then about to be established for the advocacy of 
their principles. Mr. Miller had already published a volume of 
" Legendary Tales of Cromarty," of which the late Baron Hume, 
nephew of the historian, himself a man of much judgment and taste, 
said it was " written in an English style, which he had begun to 
regard as one of the lost arts." The ability displayed by Mr. Miller 
as editor of the Witness, and the influence exerted by him on ecclesi- 
astical and educational events in Scotland, are well known. Mr. 
Miller did not confine his newspaper to topics of local or passing 
interest. In its columns he made public his geological observations 
and researches ; and most of his works originally appeared in the 
form of articles in that newspaper. It was in 1840, the year at which 
the autobiographical memoir closes, that the name of Hugh Miller 
first became widely known beyond his own country. 

At the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of 
Science at Glasgow that year. Sir Roderick, then Mr. INIurchison, 
gave an account of the striking discoveries recently made in the Old 
Red Sandstone of Scotland. M. Agassiz, who was present, pointed 
out the peculiarities and the importance of these discoveries ; and it 
was on this occasion that he proposed to associate the name of Mr. 
Miller with them, by the wonderful fossil, the Ptericlithjs Millen, 
specimens of which were then under the notice of the section. Dr. 
Buckland, following M. Agassiz, said that " he had never besn so 
3 



26 MEMORIALS OF HUGH MILLER. 

much astonished in his life by the powers of any man as he had been 
by the geological descriptions of J\Ir. ^Miller. He described these 
objects with a felicity which made him ashamed of the comparative 
meagreness and poverty of his own descriptions in the ' Bridgewater 
Treatise,' which had cost him hours and days of labor. He (Dr. 
Buckland) would give hui left hand to possess such powers of descrip- 
tion as this man ; and if it pleased Providence to spare his useful 
life, he, if any one, would certainly render the science attractive and 
popular, and do equal serv-ice to theology and geology." At the 
meetings of the Association, the language of panegyric and of mutual 
compliment is not unfrequent, and does not signify much ; but these 
were spontaneous tributes of praise to one comparatively unknown. 
The publication of the volume on the " Old Red Sandstone," with 
the details of the author's discoveries and researches, more than jus- 
tified all the anticipations that had been formed. • It was received 
with highest approbation, not by men of science alone, for the 
interest of its facts, but by men of letters, for the beauty of its style. 
Sir Roderick Murchison, in his address to the Geological Society 
that year, " hailed the accession to their science of such a writer/' 
and said that " his work is, to a beginner, worth a thousand didactic 
treatises." The Edinburgh Review spoke of the book being " as 
admirable for the clearness of its descriptions, and the sweets 
ness of its composition, as for the purity and gracefulness that per- 
vade it." The impression made by such a testimony was the more 
marked, that the reviewer spoke of the writer as a fellow country- 
man, " meritorious and self-taught." 

In 1847 appeared " First Impressions of England and its People," 
the result of a tour made during the previous year. Some parts of 
this book, especially the account of the pilgrimages to Stratford-on- 
Avon, and the Leasowes, and Olney, and other places memorable for 
their literary associations, are as fine pieces of descriptive writing as 
the English language possesses. This magic of style characterized 
all his works, whether those of a more popular kind, or his scientific 
treatises, such as the " Old Red Sandstone," and " Footprints of the 
Creator," a volume suggested by the " Vestiges of Creation," and 
subversive of the fallacies of that superficial and plausible book. 
Not one of the authors of our day has approached Hugh Miller as a 
master of English composition, for the equal of which we must go 
back to the times of Addison, Hume, and Goldsmith. Other living 
writers have now a wider celebrity, but they owe it much to the 
peculiarities of their stvie or the populeirity of their topics. Mr. 



MEMORIALS OF HUGH MILLER. 27 

Miller has taken subjects of science, too often rendered dry and 
repulsive, and has thrown over them an air of attractive romance. 
His writings on literature, hlstor}-, and politics, are known to com- 
paratively few, from having appeared in the columns of a local news- 
pa,per. A judicious selection from his miscellaneous articles in the 
Witness would widely extend his fame, and secure for him a place, in 
classic English literature, as high as he held during his life as a peri- 
odical writer and as a scientific geologist. 

The personal appearance of Mr. MUer, or " Old Red," as he was 
familiarly named by his scientific friends, will not be forgotten by 
any who have seen him. A head of great massiveness, magnified by 
an abundant profusion of sub-Celtic hair, was set on a body of mus- 
cular compactness, but which In later years felt the undermining 
influence of a life of unusual physical and mental toil. Generally 
wrapped in a bulky plaid, and with a garb ready for any work, he 
had the appearance of a shepherd from the Rosshire hills rather than 
an author and a man of science. In conversation or in lecturing, 
the man of original genius and cultivated mind at once shone out, 
and his abundant Information and philosophical acuteness were only 
less remarkable than his amiable disposition, his generous spirit, and 
his consistent, humble piety. Literature and science have lost in 
him one of their brightest ornaments, and Scotland one of its great- 
est men. 



On the Sabbath following Mr. Miller's death, sermons refer- 
ring to the event were preached in many of the churches in 
Edinburgh. Some of these were reported in the newspapers, 
among which may be mentioned those by the Rev. Drs. Hanna, 
Guthrie, Hetherington, Begg, and Tweedie. 

On Monday, December the 29th, the Funeral Obsequies 
were performed. The following account of the imposing cere- 
monial is from the Edinburgh Witness. 

FUNERAL OF ME. HUGH AHLLEK. 

The mortal remains of this truly great man were consigned to the 
grave on Monday, amid the most marked demonstrations of sorrow 
on the part of the entire community. 

The private company, nmnbering about sixty individuals, met at 
Shrub Mount, the residence of the deceased at Portobello, about a 
quarter to one hi the afternoon. Amongst those present were the 



28 MEMORIALS OF HUGH MILLER. 

Lord Provost of Edinburgh ; A. M. Dunlop, Esq., M. P. ; A. Black, 
Esq., M. P. ; Professoi*s Simpson, Balfour, and Eraser ; Rev. Princi- 
pal Cunningham; Professor James Buchanan; Rev. Drs. Guthrie, 
Candlish, Hanna, Bruce, Begg, Hetherington, and Wylie ; Rev. 
Messrs. M'Kenzie of Dunfermline, Cameron and Hunter of Nag- 
poor ; Maurice Lothian, Esq. ; Geo. Dalziell, Esq., W. S. ; W. Wood, 
Esq. ; R. Paul, Esq. ; Francis Russell, Esq., advocate ; M. Torrance, 
Esq. ; Dr. Russell ; Dr. Geo. Bell ; J. F. Macfarlan, Esq. ; Archibald 
Gibson, Esq. ; and Councillor Johnston. The devotional exercises 
were conducted by Dr. Guthrie, who was deeply affected during the 
prayer, and whose feelings at times threatened to overcome him. 

Thirteen two-horse mourning coaches were here in waiting to 
convey the company to the place of sepulture in the Grange Ceme- 
tery, preceded by the hearse, which had four horses. 

The melancholy event, as might have been expected, cast a gloom 
over the whole of Portobello; and the Provost and Magistrates, 
anticipating the general feeling of the inhabitants, to whom Mr. IVIil- 
ler had endeared himself by his genius and the modesty of his 
demeanor, and also by the readiness which he ever displayed to 
contribute to their intellectual elevation, by taking part in several 
courses of popular lectures in the town, recommended the closing of 
the different shops, — a request which was at once readily complied 
with. Another striking proof of the general desire to pay the last 
tribute, of respect to the remains of the deceased, was furnished by 
the circumstance that upwards of one hundred gentlemen, many of 
whom had, so recently as the previous Tuesday, listened to the read- 
ing of one of the ablest of his lectures, by the Rev. Mr. Wight, the 
Congregational minister, met at half-past twelve in the Free Church, 
in order to accompany the funeral, either on foot or in carriages, to 
the burial place, — a distance of about four miles. After a short, 
impressive religious service, conducted by the Rev. Mr. Pliilip and 
the Rev. Mr. Wight, they proceeded to join the private company, 
who had by this time taken their places in the mourning carriages, 
on their way to Edinburgh. 

On reaching the General Post-OfRce, in Waterloo Place, the ranks 
of the funeral procession we're largely augmented, there being here 
as many as from twenty to thirty private carriages in waiting, filled 
with the leading citizens, and a large body of the inhabitants, of all 
ranks, classes, and denominations, drawn up in line three or four 
abreast. 

The Kirk-Session of Free St. John's, of which Mr. Miller was an 



MEMORIALS OF PIUGH MILLER. 29 

office-bearer, headed by the Rev. Dr. Guthrie and the Rev. Dr. 
Ilanna, who left the carriage at the Post-Office, occupied the front 
of the procession, immediately followed by the Royal Physical So- 
ciety, of which the lamented deceased was a leading member, the 
employes in the Witness office, and a large body of the general puV 
lie. A still more numerous body of the citizens, as well as of parties 
from Glasgow, Liverpool, Stirling, Bridge of Allan, and other parts 
of the country, drew up in the rear of the long line of carriages, 
while the sides of the streets were also lined with mourners, who 
accompanied the procession to the Cemetery. Besides the large con- 
course of people who here joined the procession, the whole front of 
the Register Office and the corners of the North Bridge were densely 
occupied by some thousands of spectators ; and it may be safely said, 
that no event since the death of Dr. Chalmers has caused such deep- 
felt sorrow and regret in Edinburgh. The numbers present in the 
funeral cortege must have amounted to from one to two thousand ; 
indeed, one paper states that " at one time there could not have 
been many less than four thousand people in the procession ; " whilst 
another journal says, that although the inclemency of the weather, 
the day being one of the dreariest of the season, " kept back many who 
would otherwise have swelled the line of mourners, even with this 
drawback, it has been informed that the attendance was even greater 
than on the occasion of the funeral of Dr. Chalmers in 1847." 

After a short delay, caused by these accessions to the procession, 
the whole moved up the North Bridge. It was gratifpng to observe 
that nearly all the shops on the North and South Bridges, and in 
Nicolson and Clerk streets, along which the cortege passed, were 
closed ; and along the whole route many a saddened countenance 
and tearful eye could be seen, all testifying to the deep respect enter- 
tained for him whose manly form had so often traversed these same 
streets. 

On reaching the entrance of the Grange Cemetery, the coffin was 
removed from the hearse, and borne shoulder high to the tomb, fol- 
lowed by the pall-bearers and the general company. The ground 
selected for the burial-place is the westmost space but one on tho 
northern side of the Cemetery, and in a line with the graves of Dr. 
Chalmers, Sir Andrew Agnew, and Sheriff Speirs, with which it is 
in close proximity. As many of our readers are aware, the situation 
is one of surpassing scenic beauty, and was described by the deceased's 
own matchless pen but a few years ago, on the occasion of the burial 
3* 



30 MEMORIALS OF HUGH MILLER. 

of Chalmers ; and certainly in the grave of Hugh Mllcr a new 
feature of attraction has been added to the spot. 

The pall-bearers were Mr. Miller's oldest son, — a boy about four- 
teen years of age, — who was accompanied by his younger brother, 
six or seven years old ; Mr. A. Williamson, his half-brother and 
nearest kinsman ; Mr. Fairly, his partner in business ; Rev. Dr. 
Guthrie, Rev. Dr. Hanna, Mr. Dunlop, M. P., Mr. R. Paul, and 
Principal Cunningham. 

The mournful ceremony was now near its close. As the hea\'y, 
dull sound, caused by the fall of the damp earth upon the coffin, fell 
upon the ear, a sad and painful sensation crept over the^ frame, 
increased as this was by the wintry aspect of the day and the heavy 
leaden sky, which, like a pall, was spread over the face of nature, in 
striking harmony with the solemnity of the scene. A few minutes 
more, and all was over ; and the vast company, uncovered, paid the 
closing mark of respect to the ashes of the mighty dead. A toucht 
ing scene occurred at the close of all. After the Avhole of the com- 
pany had retired, a laboring man, clad in humble habiliments, seized 
hold of a handful of ivy or laurel leaves, and gently strewed them 
upon the grave, while the tearfiil eye eloquently spoke of the strength 
of his feelings. 

So passed away one of whom Dr. Chalmers made the remark 
that " since Scott's death he was the greatest Scotchman that 
was left." " The space his name occupied in the literary and 
scientific world," says another, " could hardly have been con- 
*■ jectured, but for the blank he leaves behind him now that he 
has left it. Other men may have extended the domain of 
science wider ; but no man has done more to extend the circle 
of its votaries by the magic of his style and the life-like power 
of his descriptions ; nor has any man done more to keep to- 
gether the claims, too often made to appear divergent, of Science 
and Religion, and to blend them into one intelligent and reason- 
able service. It was worth while to have lived to effect this, 
even at the cost of the clouds which saddened and darkened 
the close. Bat 



* glory without end 



Scatters the clouds away; and on that name attend 
The thanks and praises of all time.' " 



MEMORIALS OB HUGH MILLER. 31 

A PRAYER 

BY JOHN KNOX, 

MADE AT THE FIRST ASSEMBLIE OF THE COXGREGATION, WHEIn 
THE COXFESSIOX OF OUR FAITHE AND WHOLE ORDERS OF 
THE CHURCH WAS THERE RED AND APPROVED.* 

O Lord God Almightie, and Father moste mercifull, there is none 
lyke thee in heaven nor in earthe, which workest all thinges for the 
glorie of thy name and the comfort of thyne elect. Thou dydst once 
make man ruler over all thy creatures, and placed hym in the gar- 
den of all pleasures ; but how soone, alas, dyd he in his felicitie 
forget thy goodness ? Thy people Israel also, in their wealth dyd 
evermore runne astray, abusinge thy manifold mercies ; lyke as all 
fleshe contjTiually rageth when it hath gotten libertie and external 
prosperitie. But such is thy wisdome adjoyned to thy mercies, deare 
Father, that thou sekest all means possible to brynge thy chyldren 
to the sure sense and lyvely feelinge of thy fatherly favour. And 
therefore when prosperitie wyll not serve, then sendest thow adver- 
sitie, graciously correctinge all thy chyldren whome thou receyvest 
into thy howshold. Wherfore we, wretched and miserable synners, 
render unto thee most humble and hartie thankes, that yt hath 
pleased thee to call us home to thy folde by thy Fatherly correction 
at this present, wheras in our prosperitie and libertie we dyd neglect 
thy graces offered unto us. For the which negligence, and many 
other grevous synnes whereof we now accuse our selves before thee, 
thow mightest moste justly have gyven us up to reprobate mynds and 
induration of our hartes, as thow haste done others. But such is thy 
goodnes, O Lord, that thou semest to forget all our offences, and haste 
called us of thy good pleasure from all idolatries into this Citie most 
Christianlye refourmed, to professe thy name, and to suffer some 
crosse amongest thy people for thy truth and Gospell's sake; and so 
to be thy wytnesses with thy Prophets and Apostles, yea, with thy 
dearely beloved Sonne Jesus Christ our head, to whome thow dost 
begynne here to fashion us lyke, that in his glorie we may also be 
lyke hym when he shall appear. O Lord God, what are we upon 

♦ See ante, p. 9. 



32 MEMORIALS OF HUGH MILLER. 

whome thowe shuldest shewe tlils great mercye ? O moste lovynge 
Lord, forgyve us our unthankfulnes, and all our synnes, for Jesus 
Christ's sake. O heavenly Father, Increase thy Holy Spirit In us, to 
teache our heartes to cry Abba, deare Father ! to assure us of our 
eternal election in Christ ; to revele thy wyll more and more towards 
us ; to confirme us so in thy trewthe, that we may lyve and dye 
therein ; and that by the power of the same Spirit we may boldlely 
gyve an accompts of our faith to all men with humblenes and meke- 
nes, that whereas they backbyte and slaunder us as evyll doers, they 
may be ashamed and once stopp their mowthes, seinge our good 
conversation in Christ lesu, for whose sake we beseche thee, O Lord 
God, to guide, governe, and prosper this our enterprise In assemblinge 
our bretherne, to prayse thy holie name. And not only to be here 
present with us thy children according to thy promesse, but also 
mercifullie to assist thy like persecuted people, our Bretherne, gath- 
ered in all other places, that they and we, consentinge together in 
one spirite and truethe, may (all worldly respectes set a part) seke 
thy onely honor and glorie in all our and their Assemblies. 

SO BE IT. 



THE 



TESTIMONY OP THE EOCKS. 



LECTURE FIRST. 

THE PALiEONTOLOGICAL HISTORY OF PLANTS. 

PALiEONTOLOGY, or the science of ancient organisms, 
deals, as its subject, ^vith all the plants and animals of all 
the geologic periods. It bears nearly the same sort of 
relation to the physical history of the past, that biography 
does to the civil and political history of the past. For just 
as a complete biographic system would include every name 
known to the historian, a complete palaeontologic system 
would include every fossil kno'vvn to the geologist. It 
enmnerates and describes all the organic existences of all 
the extinct creations, — all the existences, too, of the pres- 
ent creation that occur in the fossil or semi.fossil form; 
and, thus coextensive in space ^v^th the earth's surface, — 
nay, greatly more than coextensive with the earth's sur- 
fxce, — for in the vast hierogl}^:>hic record which our globe 
composes, page lies beneath j^age, and inscription covers 
over inscription, — coextensive, too, in time, with every 
period in the terrestrial history since being first began 
upon our planet, — it presents to the student a theme so 
vast and multifarious, that it might seem but the result, on 
his part, of a proper modesty, conscious of the limited 



84 THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 

range of his powers, and of the brief and fleeting term of 
his life, were he to despair of being ever able eifectually to 
grapple with it. " But," to borrow from one of the most 
ingenious of our Scottish metaphysicians, "in this, as in 
other instances in which nature has given us difliculties 
with which to cope, she has not left us to be wholly over- 
come," "If," says Dr. Thomas Bro\^^l, in his remarks on 
the classifying principle, — " if she has jDlaced us in a 
labyrinth, she has at the same time furnished us mth a 
clue which may guide us, not, indeed, through all its dark 
and mtricate windings, but through those broad paths 
which conduct us into day. The single power by which 
we discover resemblance or relation in general, is a sufficient 
aid to us in the perplexity or confusion of our first attempts 
at arrangement. It begins by converting thousands, and 
more than thousands, into one ; and, reducing in the same 
manner the numbers thus formed, it arrives at last at the 
few distinctive characters of those great comprehensive 
tribes on which it ceases to operate, because there is nothing 
left to oppress the memory or the understanding." 

But, is this all ? Can the Palaeontologist but say that that 
classifying principle, which in every other department of 
science yields such assistance to the memory, is also of use in 
his, or but urge that it enables him to sort and arrange his 
facts ; and that, by converting one idea into the type and 
exemplar of many resembling ones, it imparts to him an 
ability of carrying not inadequate conceptions of the mighty 
whole in his mind ? If this were all, you might well ask, 
"Why obtrude upon us, in connection with your special 
science, a common semi-metaphysical idea, equally applica- 
ble to all the sciences, — in especial, for example, to that 
botany which is the science of existing plants, and to that 
zoology which is the science of existing animals ? Nay, I 
reply, but it is not all. I refer to this classifying principle 



HISTORY or PLANTS. 35 

because, while it exists in relation to all other sciences as a 
principle — to use the words of the metaphysician just 
quoted — "given to us by nature," — as a principle of the 
mind within^ — it exists in Palseontological science as a 
principle of nature itself, — as a principle palpably external 
to the rtiincl. It is a marvellous fact, Avhose full meaning 
we can as yet but imperfectly comprehend, that myriads of 
ages ere there existed a human mind, well nigh the same 
principles of classification noAV developed by man's intellect 
in our better treatises of zoology and botany, were devel- 
oped on this earth by the successive geologic periods ; and 
tliat the by-past productions of our planet, animal and veg- 
etable, Avere chronologically arranged in its history, accord- 
ing to the same laws of thought which impart regularity 
and order to the works of the later naturalist and phytolo- 
gists. 

I need scarce say how slow and interrupted in both prov- 
inces the course of arrangement has been, or how often 
succeeding writers have had to undo what their predeces- 
sors had done, only to have their own classifications set 
aside by their successors in turn. At length, however, 
when the work appears to be well nigh completed, a new 
science has arisen, which presents us with a very wonderful 
means of testing it. Cowley, in his too eulogistic ode to 
Jlobbes, — smit by the singular ingenuity of the philosophic 
infidel, and unable to look through his sophisms to the con- 
sequences which they involved, — could say, in addressing 
liim, that 

" only God could know 
"WTiether the fair idea he did show- 
Agreed entirely with God's own or no." 

And he then not very wisely added, — 

" This, I dare boldly tell, 
'T is so like truth, 't will serve our turn as well," 



36 THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 

We now know, however, that no mere resemblance to 
truth will for any considerable length of time serve its turn. 
It is because the resemblances have, hke those of Hobbes, 
been mere resemblances, that so much time and labor have 
had to be wasted by the pioneers of science in their re- 
moval ; and, now that a wonderful opportunity has occurred 
of comparing, in this matter of classification, the human 
with the Divine idea, — the idea embodied by the zoologists 
and botanists in their respective systems, with the idea 
embodied by the Creator of all in geologic history, — we 
cannot perhaps do better, in entering upon our subject, 
than to glance briefly at the great features in which God's 
order of classification, as developed in Palaeontology, agrees 
with the order in which man has at length learned to range 
the living productions, plant and animal, by which he is 
surrounded, and of which he himself forms the most re- 
markable portion. In an age in which a class of writers 
not without their influence in the world of letters would 
fain repudiate every argument derived from desig7i, and 
denounce all who hold with Paley and Chalmers as anthro- 
pomorphists, that labor to create for themselves a god of 
their o^vq type and form, it may be not altogether unprofit- 
able to contemplate the wonderful parallelism which exists 
between the Divine and human systems of classification, an^ 
— remembering that the geologists who have discovered 
the one had no hand in assisting the naturalists and phytol- 
ogists who framed the other — soberly to inquire whether 
we have not a new argument in the fact for an identity in 
constitution and quality of the Divine and human minds, — 
not a mere fanciful identity, the result of a disposition on tlie 
part of man to imagine to liimself a God bearing his own 
likeness, but an identity real and actual, and the result of 
that creative act by which God formed man in his own image. 
The study of plants and animals seems to liave been a 



HISTOItY OF PLAINTS. 37 

favorite one with thoughtful men in every age of the world. 
According to the Psalmist, these great " works of the 
Lord are sought out of all them that have pleasure ther em." 
The Book of Job, probably the oldest writing in existence, is 
foil of vivid descriptions of the wild denizens of the flood 
and desert; and it is expressly recorded of the wise old 
king, that he " spake of trees, from the cedar tree that is in 
juebanon, even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the 
wall ; and also of beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping 
things, and of fishes." Solomon was a zoologist and botanist; 
and there is palpable classification in the manner in which 
his studies are described. It is a law of the human mind, 
as has been already said, that, wherever a large stock of 
facts are acquired, the classifying principle steps in to 
arrange them. " Even the rudest wanderer in the fields," 
says Dr. Brown, "finds that the profusion of blossoms 
around him — in the greater number of which he is able 
himself to discover many striking resemblances — may be 
reduced to some order of arrangement." But, for many 
centuries, this arranging faculty labored but to little pur- 
pose. As specimens of the strange classification that con- 
tinued to obtain do^vn till comparatively modern times, 
let us select that of two works which, fi*om the literary 
celebrity of their authors, still possess a classical standing 
in letters, — Cowley's " Treatise on Plants," and Gold- 
smith's "History of the Earth and Animated Nature." 
The plants we find arranged by the i:)oet on the simple but 
very inadequate principle of size and show. Herbs are 
placed first, as lowest and least conspicuous in the scale ; 
then flowers ; and, finally, trees. Among the herbs, at least 
two of the ferns — the true maidenhair and the spleenwort 
— are assigned places among plants of such high standing 
as sage, mint, and rosemary : among the flowers,^ monoco- 
tyledons, such as the iris, the tulip, and the lily, appear 
4 



38 THE PALiEONTOLOGICAL 

among dicotyledons, sucl;i as the rose, the violet, the sun- 
flower, and the auricula: and among trees we find the 
palms placed between the plum and the olive ; and the yew, 
the fir, and the juniper, flanked on one side by the box and 
the holly, and on the other by the oak. Such, in treating 
of plants, was the classification adopted by one of the most 
learned of English poets in the year 1657. 

Nor was Goldsmith, who wrote more than a century 
later, much more fortunate in dealing with the animal 
kingdom. Buflbn had already published his great work ; 
and even he could bethink him of no better mode of divid- 
ing his animals than into wild and tame. And in Gold- 
smith, w^ho adopted, in treating of the mammals, a similar 
principle, we find the fishes and molluscs placed in advance 
of the sauroid, ophidian, and batrachian reptiles, — the 
whale united in close relationship to the sharks and rays, — 
animals of the tortoise kind classed among animals of the 
lobster kind, and both among shell fish, such as the snail, 
the nautilus, and the oyster. And yet Goldsmith was 
engaged on his work little more than eighty years ago. In 
fine, the true principles of classification in the animal king- 
dom are of well nigh as recent development as geologic 
science itself, and not greatly more ancient in even the 
vegetable kingdom. It would, of course, be wholly out of 
place to attempt giving a minute history here of the prog- 
ress of arrangement in either department; but it can 
scarce be held that the natural system of plants was other 
than very incomplete previous to 1789, when Jussieu first 
enunciated his scheme of classification; nor did it receive 
its later improvements until so late as 1846, when, after the 
publication, in succession, of the schemes of De Gandolle and 
Endlicher, Lindley communicated his finished system to the 
world. And thei-e certainly existed no even tolerably per- 
fect system of zoology until 1810, when the "Animal King- 



HISTORY OF PLANTS. 39 

dom " of Cuvier appeared. Later naturalists, — such as 
Agassiz, in his own special department, the history of fishes, 
and Professor Owen in the invertebrate diA'isions, — have 
improved on the classification of even the great Frenchman ; 
but for purposes of comparison between the scheme 
developed in geologic history and that at length elaborated 
by the human mind, the system of Cuvier will be found, for 
at least our present purpose, suflSiciently complete. And m 
tracing through time the course of the vegetable kingdom, 
let us adopt, as our standard to measure it by, the system 
of Lindley. 

Commencing at the bottom of the scale, we find the 
Thallogens, or flowerless plants which lack proper stems 
and leaves, — a class which includes all the algae. Next 
succeed the Acrogens, or flowerless plants that possess both 
stems and leaves, — such as the ferns and their allies. Xext, 
omitting an inconspicuous class, represented by but a few 
parasitical plants incapable of preservation as fossils, come 
the Endogens, — monocotyledonous floAvering plants, that 
include the palms, the liliacese, and several other families, all 
characterized by the parallel venation of their leaves. 
Next, omitting another inconspicuous tribe, there follows a 
very important class, — the Gymnogens, — polycotyledo- 
nous trees, represented by the coniferse and cycadacege. 
And, last of all, come the Dicotyledonous Exogens, — a class 
to which all our fruit, and what are kno-wn as our '' forest 
trees," belong, with a vastly preponderating majority of the 
herbs and flowers that impart fertihty and beauty to our 
gardens and meadows. This last class, though but one, now 
occupies much greater space in the vegetable kingdom than 
all the others united. 

Such is the arrangement of Lindley, or rather an arrange- 
ment the slow grov/th of ages, to which this distinguished 
botanist has given the last finishing touches. And let us 



40 



THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 



now mark how closely it resembles the geologic arrange- 
ment as developed in the successive stages of the earth's 
history. 

Fig. 1.* 

Thallogens. 



Silurian. 
Old Bed. 

Carboniferous. 

Permian. 
Triassic. 

Oolitic. 
Cretaceous. 

Tertiary. 



.Acrogens. 
Gymnogens. 

Monocotyledons. 



Dicotyledons. 



Dicotyledonous Trees. 



Geolo^c [Thai. Ac. Gy. Mon. Dicl arrangement. 
Lindley's [Thai. Ac. Mon. Gy. Die] arrangement. 

THE GENEALOGY OF PLANTS. 



The most ancient period of whose organisms any trace 
remains in the rocks seems to have been, prevaiUngly at 

* The horizontal lines in this diagram indicate the divisions of the 
various geologic systems; the vertical lines the sweep of the various 
classes or sub-classes of plants across the geologic scale, with, so far as 
has yet been ascertained, the place of their first appearance in creation ; 
while the double line of type below shows in what degree the order of 
their occuiTcnce agrees Avith the arrangement of the botanist. The single 
point of difference indicated by the diagram between the order of occur- 
rence and that of arrangement, viz., the transposition of the gymnogenousi 
and monocotyledonous classes, must be regarded as purely provisional. 
It is definitely ascertained that the Lower Old Red Sandstone has its 
coniferous wood, but not yet definitely ascertained that it has its true 
monocotyledonous plants; though indications are not awanting that the 
latter were introduced upon the scene at least as early as the pines or 
araucarians; and the chance discovery of some fossil in a sufficiently good 



HISTORY OF PLANTS. 41 

least, a period of Thallogens. We must, of course, take 
into account the fact, tliat it has yielded no land plants, and 
that tlie sea is everywhere now, as of old, the great habitat 
of the algge, — one of the four great orders into which the 
Tliallogens are divided. There appear no traces of a ter- 
restrial vegetation until we reach the uppermost beds of 
the UiDper Silurian System. But, accovmt for the fact as 
we may, it is at least worthy of notice, that, alike in the 
systems of our botanists and in the chronological arrange- 
ments of our geologists, the first or introductory class 
which occurs in the ascending order is this humble Thallo- 
genic class. There is some trace in the Lower Silurians of 
Scotland of a vegetable structure which may have belonged 
to one of the humbler Endogens, of which, at least, a single 
genus, the Zosteraceoe^ still exists in salt water; but the 
trace is faint and doubtful, and, even were it established, it 
would form merely a solitary exception to the general 
evidence that the first known j)eriod of A'egetable existence 
was a period of Thallogens. The terrestrial remains of the 
Upper Silurians of England, the oldest yet known, consist 
chiefly of spore-like bodies, which belonged, says Dr. 
Hooker, to Lycopodiacese, — an order of the second or 
acrogenic class. And, in the second great geologic period, 
— that of the Old Red Sandstone, — we find this second 
class not inadequately represented. In its lowest fossil- 
iferous beds w^e detect a Lycopodite which not a little 
resembles one of the commonest of our club mosses, — Ly-' 
copodhim clavatmn^ — Avith a minute fern and a large stri- 
ated plant resembling a calamite, and evidently allied to an 
existing genus of Acrogens, the equisetacea3. In the Middle 
Old Red Sandstone there also occurs a small fern, with 

state of keeping to determine the point may, of course, at once retrans- 
pose the transposition, and bring into complete correspondence the geo- 
logic and botanic arrangements. 
4* 



42 



THE PALJEONTOLOGICAL 



Fig. 2 



some trace of a larger; and one of its best preserved 
vegetable organisms is a lepidodendron, — an extinct ally 

of the Lycopodiums; while in 
the upper beds of the system, 
especially as developed in the 
south of Ireland, the noble fern 
known as Cyclopteris Hibernicus 
is very abundant. This fern has 
been detected also in the Upper 
Old Red of our own country, 
mingled with fragments of con- 
temporary calamites. With, 
however, these earliest plants of 
the land yet known, there occurs 
a true wood, which belonged, as 
shown by its structure, to a 
gymnospermous or poly cot yle- 
donous tree, and which we find 
associated with remains of Coc- 
costeus and Diplacanthus. 

And here let me remark, that 
the facts of Palseontological 
science compel us to blend, in 
some degree, with the classifica- 
tion of our modern botanists, 
that of the botanists of an earlier 
time. In a passage already quoted, Solomon is said to 
have discoursed of plants, "from the cedar tree that is 
in Lebanon, to the hyssop that springeth out of the wall," 
— from the great tree to the minute herb ; and Cowley 
rose, in his metrical treatise, as has been shoA\Ti, from 
descriptions of herbs and flowers to descriptions of fruit 
and forest trees. And as in every age in which there 
existed a terrestrial vegetation there seem to ha^'c been 




CYCLOPTETIIS HIBERNICUS. 

(Nat. size.) 



HISTORY OF PLANTS. 43 

" trees " as certainly as " herbs, the palseontological bot- 
antist finds that he has, m consequence, to range his classes, 

Fig. 3. 




CONIFER OF THE LOWER OLD RED SANDSTONE. 

Cromarty. 

(Mag. forty diameters.) 

not in one series, but in two, — the Gynmogens, or cono- 
bearing trees, in a line nearly parallel with the Acrogens, 
or flowerless, spore-bearing herbs. But the arrangement is 
in no degree the less striking from the circumstance that it 
is ranged, not in one, but in two lines. It is, however, an 
untoward arrangement for the purposes of the Lamarckian, 
whose peculiar hypothesis Avould imperatively demand, not 
a double, but a single column, in which the ferns and club 
mosses would stand far in advance, in point of time, of the 
Coniferge. In the Coal Measures, so remarkable for the 
great luxuriance of tL^ir flora, both the G}Tnnogens and 
Acrogens are largely developed, with a very puzzling inter- 



44 THE PALJLONTOLOGICAL 

mediate class, that, while they attained to the size of trees, 
like the former, retained in a remarkable degree, as in tlie 
Lepidodendra and the Calamites, the peculiar features of 
the latter. And with these there appear, though more 
sparingly, the Endogens, — monocotyledonous plants, rep- 
resented by a few palm-like trees (Palmacites), a few date- 
like fruits (Trigonocarpum), and a few grass-like herbs 
(Poacites). In the great Secondary division, the true dico- 
tyledonous plants first appear ; but, so far as is yet known, 
no dicotyledonous wood. In the earlier formations of the 
division a degree of doubt attaches to even the few leaves 
of this class hitherto detected ; but in the Lower Creta- 
ceous strata they become at once unequivocal in their char- 
acter, and comparatively abundant, both as individuals and 
species ; and in the Tertiary deposits they greatly out- 
number all the humbler classes, and appear not only as 
herbs, but also as great trees. Not, however, until shortly 
before the introduction of man do some of their highest 
orders, such as the Rosacese, come upon the scene, as 
plants of that great garden — including the fields of the 
agriculturist — which it has been part of man's set task 
upon earth to keep and to dress. And such seems to be 
the order of classification in the vegetable kingdom, as 
developed in creation, and determined by the geologic 
periods. 

The parallelism which exists between the course of 
creation, as exhibited in the animal kingdom, and the classi- 
fication of the greatest zoologist of modern times, is perhai:)s 
still more remarkable. Cuvier divides all animals into 
vertebrate and invertebrate ; the invertebrates consisting, 
according to his arrangement, of three great divisions, — 
mollusca, articulata, and radiata; and the vertebrates, of 
four great classes, — the mammals, .he birds, the reptiles, 
and the fishes. From the lowest zone at which organic 



HISTORY OF PLANTS. 



45 



remains occur, up till the higher beds of the Lower Silurian 
System, all the animal remains yet found belong to the 
invertebrate divisions. The numerous tables of stone which 
compose the leaves of this first and earliest of the geologic 
volumes correspond in their contents with that concluding 
volume of Cuvier's great work in which he deals with the 
moUusca, articulata, and radiata ; with, however, this differ- 
ence, that the three great divisions, instead of occurring in 
a continuous series, are ranged, like the terrestrial herbs 
and trees, in parallel columns. The chain of animal being 
on its first appearance is, if I may so express myself, a three- 
fold chain; — a fact nicely correspondent T\ith the further 



Fig. 4. 



Silurian. 
Old Red. 
Carboniferous. 



Fermian. 
Triassic. 

Oolitic. 



Tertiary. 



Rad. Art. Mol- 

Fishes. 

Reptiles. 



"Birds. 
Mammals. 



■Pla. Mam. 



Recent. I I I I t 1 > i Man. 

Geologic [Rad. Art. Mol. Fish. Rep. Bird. Mam. Man.] Arrangement. 
Cuvier's [Rad. Art. Mol. Fish. Rep. Bird. Mara. Man.] Arrangement. 

THE GENEALOGY OF ANIMALS. 

fact, that we cannot in the present preation range serially^ 
as either higher or lower in the scale, at least two of these 



* The horizontal lines of the diagram here indicate, as in Fig. 1, the 
divisions of the seyeral geologic systems; the vertical lines represent the 



46 THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 

divisions, — the moUusca and articulata. In one of the 
higher beds of the Upper Silurian System, — a bed which 
borders on the base of the Old Red Sandstone, — the ver- 
tebrates make their earhest appearance in their fourth or 
ichthyic class ; and we find ourselves in that volume of the 
geologic record which corresponds to Cu\der's volume on 
the fishes. In the many-folded pages of the Old Red Sand- 
stone, till we reach the highest and last, there occur the 
remains of no other vertebrates than those of this fourth 
class ; but in its uppermost deposits there appear traces of 
the third or reptilian class ; and in passing upwards still, 
through the Carboniferous, Permian, and Triassic Systems, 
we find reptiles continuing the master existences of the 
time. The geologic volume in which these great formations 
are included corresponds to the Cuvierian one devoted to 
the ReptUia. Early in the Oolitic System, birds, Cuvier's 
second class of the vertebrata, make their first appearance, 
though their remains, like those of birds in the present time, 
are rare and infrequent ; and, for at least the earlier periods 
of their existence, we know that they were, — that they 
haunted for food the waters of the period, and waded in 
their shallows, — only from marks similar to those by which 
Crusoe became first aware of the visits paid to his island by 
his savage neighbors, — their footprints, left impressed on 
the sands over which they stalked of old. This early 
Oolitic volume corresponds in its contents to the section de- 
voted by Cuvier, in his great work, to his second class, the 
birds. And in the Stonisfield slate, — a deposit interposed 

leading divisions and. classes of animals, and, as shown by the formations 
in which their earliest known remains occur, the probable period of their 
first appearance in creation*; while the double line of text below exhibits 
the complete correspondence which obtains between their occurrence in 
nature and the Cuvierian arrangement. The line representative of the 
Radiata ought perhaps to have been elevated a little higher than either of 
tts two neighbors. 



HISTORY OF PLANTS. 47 

between the "Inferior" and "Great Oolites," we detect 
the earliest indications of his first or mammaliferous class, 
apparently represented, however, by but one order, — the 
Marsupiata, or pouched animals, to whose special place in 
the scale I shall afterwards have occasion to refer. Not 
until we reach the times of the Tertiary division do the 
mammals in their higher orders appear. The great Terti- 
ary volume corresponds to those volumes of Cuvier which 
treat of the placental animals that suckle their young. 
And finally, — last born of creation, — man appears upon 
the scene, in his several races and varieties ; the sublime 
arch of animal being at length receives its keystone ; and 
the finished work stands up complete, from foundation to 
pinnacle, at once an admirably adjusted occupant of space, 
and a wonderful monument of Divine arrangement and 
classification, as it exists in time. Save at two special 
points, to which I shall afterwards advert, the particular 
arrangement unfolded by geologic history is exactly that 
which the greatest and most philosophic of the naturalists 
had, just pre\dous to its discovery, originated and adopted 
as most conformable to nature : the arrangements of geo- 
logic history as exhibited in time, if, commencing at the 
earliest ages, we pursue it downwards, is exactly that of 
the " Animal Kingdom " of Cuvier read backwards. 

Let ns then, in grappling with the vast multiplicity of 
our subject, attempt reducing and simplifying it by means 
of the classifying principle ; not simply, however, — again 
to recur to the remark of the metaphysician, — as an inter- 
nal principle given us by nature, but as an external principle 
exemplified by nature. Let us take the organisms of the 
old geologic periods in the order in which they occur in 
time ; secure, as has been shoAvn, that if our chronology be 
correct, our classification aWII, as a consequence, be good. 
It will be for the natural theologians of the coming age Xy. 



48 THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 

show the bearing of this wonderful fact on the progress of 
man towards the just and the solid, and on the being and 
character of man's Creator, — to estabhsh, on the one hand, 
against the undue depredators of intellect and its results, 
that in certain departments of mind, such as that which 
deals with the arrangement and development of the scheme 
of organic being, human thought is not profitlessly revolv- 
ing in an idle circle, but progressing Godwards, and gradu- 
ally unlocking the order of creation. And, on the other 
hand, it will be equally Ms proper business to demand of 
the Pantheist how, — seeing that only persons (such as the 
Cuviers and Lindleys) could have wrought out for themselves 
the real arrangement of this scheme, — how, I say, or on what 
principle, it is to be held that it was a scheme originated 
and estabhshed at the beginning, not by a personal, but by 
an impersonal God. But our present business is with the 
fact of the parallel arrangements. Divine and human, — 
not with the inferences legitimately deducible from it. 

Beginning with the plants, let us, however, remark, that 
they do not precede in the order of their appearance the 
humbler animals. No more ancient organism than the 

Fig. 5. 




OLDHAMiA antiqua; — the oldest known Zoophyte. 
^ Wrae Head, Ireland. 

Oldhamia of the Lowest Irish Silurians, a plant-like zoo- 
phyte somewhat resembling our modern sertularia, has yet 



HISTORY OF PLANTS. 



49 



been detected by the geologist ; though only a few months 
ago the researches of Mr. Salter in the ancient rocks of the 
Longmynd, Shropshire, previously deemed unfossiliferous, 
have given to it what seem to be contemporary vegetable 
organisms, in a few ill-preserved fucoids. So far as is yet 
known, plants and animals appear together. The long u^- 
ward march of the animal kingdom takes its departure at 
its starting point from a thick forest of algae. In Bohemia, 
in Xorway, in Sweden, in the British Islands, in North 
America, wherever, in fine, what appears to be the lowest, or 
at least one of the lowest, zones of life has yet been detected, 
the rocks are found to be darkened by the remains of algae, 
so abundantly developed in some cases, that they compose, 
as in the ancient Lower Silurians of Dumfriesshire, impure 
beds of anthracite several feet in thickness. Apparently, 
fi-om the original looseness of their texture, the individual 
plants are but indiiferently preserved ; nor can we expect 
that organisms so ancient should exhibit any veri/ close 
resemblance to the plants which darken the half-tide rocks 
and skerries of our coasts at the present time. We do 
detect, however, in some of these primordial fossils, at least 



Fig. 6. 




PALiEOCHORDA MIXOR. 

(One half nat. size.) 

a noticeable likeness to families familiar to the modem algae- 
ologist. The cord-like plant. Chorda jilum^ known to our 
5 



60 THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 

children as " dead men's ropes," from its proving fatal at 
times to the too adventurous swimmer who gets entangled 
in its thick wreaths, had a Lower Silurian representative, 
known to the Palaeontologist as the Paloeochorda^ or an- 
cient chorda, which existed a]3parently in two species, — a 
larger and smaller. The still better known Chondrus cris- 
pus, the Irish moss or carrageen of our cookery-books, has 
likewise its apparent though more distant representative in 
Chondritis^ a Lower Silurian algae, of which there seems to 
exist at least three species. The fucoids, or kelp weeds, 
appear to have had also their representatives in .such plants 
as Fucoides gracilis of the Lower Silurians of the Malverns; 
in short, the Thallogens of the first ages of vegetable life 
seem to have resembled, in the group, and in at least 
their more prominent features, the algae of the existing 
time. And with the first indications of land we pass direct 
from the Thallogens to the Acrogens, — from the sea weeds 
to the fern allies. The Lycopodiaceae, or club mosses, bear 
in the axils of their leaves minute circular cases, which form 
the receptacles of their spore-like seeds. And when, high 
in the Upper Silurian System, and just when preparing to 
quit it for the Lower Old Red Sandstone, we detect our 
earliest terrestrial organisms, we find that they are com- 
posed exclusively of those Uttle spore receptacles. The num- 
ber of land plants gradually increases as we ascend into the 
overlying system. Still, however, the Flora of even the 
Old Red is but meagre and poor; and you will perhaps 
permit me to lighten this part of my subject, which threat- 
ens too palpably to partake of the poverty of that with 
which it deals, by a simple illustration. 

We stand, at low ebb, on the outer edge of one of those 
iron-bound shores of the Western Highlands, rich in forests 
of algae, from which, not yet a generation bygone, our Celtic 
proprietors used to derive a larger portion of their revenues 



HISTORY OF PLANTS. 



51 



than from their fields and moors. Rock and skerry are 
brown with sea weed. The long cylindrical lines of Chorda 
filum^ many feet in length, lie aslant in the tideway ; long 
shaggy bunches of Fucus serratus and Fiiciis nodosus droop 
heavily from the rock sides ; while the flatter ledges, that 
form the uneven floor upon which we tread, bristle thick 
with the stiff, cartilaginous, many-cleft fronds of at least two 
species of chondrus, — the common carrageen, and the 

Fig. 7. ^ Fig. 8. 



LTCOPODIUM CLAVATUM. 



EQUISETUM FLUVIATILE. 



smaller species, C. Rorvegicics. Now, in the thickly-spread 
fucoids of this Highland shore we have not a very inadequate 



52 THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 

representation of the first, or thallogenic vegetation, — that 
of the great Silurian period, as exhibited in the rocks, from 
the base to nearly the top of the system. And should we 
add to the rocky tract, rich in fucoids, a submarine meadow 
of pale shell sand, covered by a deep green swathe of zos- 
tera, with its jointed saccharine roots and slim flowers, un- 
furnished with petals, we would render it perhaps more 
adequately representative still. 

"We cross the beach, and enter on a bare bro^vn moor, 
comparatively fertile, however, in the club mosses. One of 
the largest and finest of the species, Lycopodium clavatum^ 
with its long scaly stems and upright spikes of lighter green, 
— altogether a graceful though flowerless plant, which the 
herd-boy learns to select from among its fellows, and to bind 
rpund his cap, — goes trailing on the drier spots for many 
feet over the soil ; while at the edge of trickling runnel or 



Fig. 9. 




OSMUNDA REGALis. (Royal Fem.) 

marshy hollow, a smaller and less hardy species, JOycopo- 
dmm immdatum^ takes its place. The marslies themselves 
bristle thick with the deej) green horse tail, Equisetuin 



HISTORY OF PLAN"TS. 53 

fluviatile^ witli its fluted stem and verticillate series of linear 
branches. Two other species of the same genus, Eqidsetiion 
sylvaticxim and Equisetiim arvense^ flourish on the drier 
parts of the moor, blent with two species of minute ferns, 
the moonwort and the adder's tongue, — ferns that, like the 
magnificent royal fern {Osmiinda regalis)^ though on a| 
much humbler scale, bear their seed cases on independent 
stems, and were much sought after of old for imaginary 
virtues, which the modem schools of medicine refuse to 
recognize. Higher up the moor, ferns of ampler size occur, 
and what seems to be rushes, which bear atop conglobate 
panicles on their smooth leafless stems; but at its lower 
edge little else appears than the higher Acrogens, — ferns 
and their allies. There occurs, however, just beyond the 
first group of club mosses, — a remarkable exception in a 
sohtary pine, — the advance guard of one of the ancient 

Fig. 10. 




PiNUS SYLVESTRis. (Scotch Fir.) 



forests of the country, which may be seen far in the back, 
ground, clothing with its shaggy covering of deep green 
the lower hill-slopes. And as we found in the Thallogens of 
6* 



54 THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 

that littoral zone over wliich we have just passed, represent- 
atives of the marine flora of the Silurian System, from the 
first appearance of organisms in its nether beds, to its bone- 
bed of the Upper Ludlow rocks, in which the Lycopodites 
first appear, so in the Acrogens of that moor, with its 
solitary coniferous tree, we may recognize an equally 
striking representative of the terrestrial flora which exist e:. 
during the deposition of these Ludlow rocks, and of the 
various formations of the Old Red Sandstone, Lower, 
Middle, and Upper. 

In the upper beds of tho IJpper Silurian, as has been 
already remarked, Lycopodites -e the only terrestrial plants 
yet found. In the LoAver Old Red Sandstone we find added 
to these, with Thallogens that bear at least the same geti- 
eral character as in the system beneath, minute ferns, and a 
greatly larger plant, allied to the horse tails. The Old Red 
flora seems to have been prevailingly an acrogenic flora ; 
and yet with almost its first beginnings, — contemporary 
with at least the earlier fossils of the system in Scotland, we 
find a true polycotyledonous tree, not lower in the scale 
than the araucarites of the Coal Measures, — which in 
structure it greatly resembles, — or than the pines or cedars 
of our own times (see Fig. 3). In the Middle Old Red 
Sandstone there occurs, with plants representative apparently 
of the ferns and their allies, a somewhat equivocal and doubt- 
ful organism, which may have been the panicle or compound 
fi'uit of some aquatic rush ; while in the Upper Old Red, 
just ere the gorgeous flora of the Coal Measures began to 
be, there existed in considerable abundance a stately fern, 
the Gydopteris Hihernicus (see Fig. 2), of mayhap not 
smaller proportions than our monarch of the British ferns, 
Osmu7ida regalis^ associated with a peculiar lepidodendron, 
and what seems to be a lepidostrobus, — possibly the fruc- 
tiferous spike or cone of the latter, mingled with carbona- 



HISTORY OF PLANTS. 



55 



ceous steins, which, in the simplicity of their texture, and 
their abundance, give evidence of a low but not scanty 



Fi". 11. 



Fig. 12. 




CALAMITE ? 

Of the Lower Old Eed Sandstone. 

Shetland. 

(One eighth nat. size.) 



- LTCOPODITE ? 

Of the Lower Old Red Sandstone. 

Thurso. 

(ilag. two diameters.) 



vegetation. Ere passing to the luxuriant carboniferous 
flora, I shall make but one other remark. The existing 
plants whence we derive our analogies in dealing ^vit]l the 
vegetation of this early period, contribute but little, if at all, 
to the support of animal life. The ferns and their allies 
remain untouched by the grazing animals. Our native club 
mosses, though once used in medicine, are positively dele- 



56 THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 

terious ; the horse tails, though harmless, so abound in silex, 
which wraps them round with a cuticle of stone, that they 
are rarely cropped by cattle; while the thickets of fern 

Fig. 13. 




Feen ? of Lower Old Red Sandstone. 

Orkney. 

(Nat. Size.) 

which cover our hill-sides, and seem so temptingly rich and 
green in their season, scarce support the existence of a single 
creature, and remain untouched in stem and leaf, from their 
first appearance in spring, until they droop and wither under 
the frosts of early mnter. Even the insects that infest the 
herbaria of the botanist almost never injure his ferns. Nor 
are our resin-producing conifers, though they nourish a few 
beetles, favorites '^ivith the herbivorous tribes in a much 
greater degree. Judging from all we yet know, the earliest 
terrestrial flora may have covered the dry land with its 
mantle of cheerful green, and served its general purposes, 
chemical and others, in the well-balanced economy of nature ; 
but the herb-eating animals would have fared but ill even 
where it throve most luxuriantly ; and it seems to harmonize 
with the fact of its non-edible character, that up to the pres- 
ent time we know not that a single herbivorous animal 



HISTORY OF PLANTS. 57 

lived among its shaded. From all that appears, it may be 
inferred that it had not to. serve the purposes of the floras 
of the passing-time, in which, according to the poet, 

" The world's bread depends on the shooting of a seed." 

The flora of the Coal ivieasiires was the richest and most 
luxuriant, in at least individual productions, with which the 
fossil botanist has formed any acquaintance. Never before 
or since did our planet bear so rank a vegetation as that 
of which the numerous coal seams and inflammable shales 
of the carboniferous period form but a portion of the 
remains, — the portion spared, in the first instance, by 
dissipation and decay, and in the second by the denuding 
agencies. Almost all our coal, — the stored up fuel of a 
world, — forms but a comparatively small part of the produce 
of this wonderful flora. Amid much that was so strange 
and antique of type in its productions as to set the analogies 
of the botanist at fault, there occurred one sohtary order, 
not a few of whose species closely resembled their cogeners 
of the present time. I refer, of course, to its ferns. And 
these seem to have formed no small proportion of the entire 
flora of the period. Francis estimates the recent dorsifer- 
ous ferns of Great Britaiu at thirty-five species, and the 
species of all the other genera at six more, — forty-one 
species in all ; and as the flowering plants of the country do 
not fall short of fourteen hundred species, the ferns bear to 
them the rather small proportion of about one to thirty- 
five ; whereas of the British Coal Measure flora, in which 
we do not yet reckon quite three hmidred species of plants, 
about a hundred and twenty were ferns. Three sevenths 
of the entire carboniferous flora of Britain belonged to this 
famihar class ; and for about fifty species more we can dis- 
cover no nearer analogies than those which connect them 
with the fern allies. And if with the British Coal Measure 



58 



THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 



we include those also of the Continent of America, we shall 
find the proportions in favor of the ferns still greater. The 
number of carboniferous plants hitherto described amounts, 
says M. Ad. Brogniart, to about five hundred, and of these 
two hundred and fifty, — one half of the whole, — were 
ferns. 

Fig. 14. Fig. 15. Fig. 16. 




Fig. 17. 



Fig. 18. 



Fig. 19. 




FERNS OF THE COAL MEASURES.* 

Rising in the scale from the lower to the higher vege- 
table forms of the system, — from its ferns to its trees, — 
we find great conifers, — so great that they must have 
raised their heads more than a hundred feet over the soil ; 
and such was their abundance in this neighborhood, that 

* Fig. 14, Neuropteris Loshii. Fig. 15, Neuropteris gigantea. Fig. 16, 
JSTeuropteris acuminata. Fig. 17, Sphenopteris affinis. Fig. 18, Pecopteris 
heterophylla. Fig. 19, Sphenopteris dilitata. 



.d i 



HISTORY OF PLANTS. 59 

one can scarce examine a fragment of coal beside one's 
household fire that is not charged with their carbonized 
remains. Though marked by certain peculiarities of struc- 
ture, they bore, as is shown by the fossil trunks of Grant on 
and Craigleith, the familiar outlines of true coniferous trees ; 
and would mayhap have differed no more in appearance 
from their successors of the same order that now live in our 
forests, than these differ from the conifers of New Zealand 
or of i^ew South Wales. We have thus, in the numerous 




ALTINGIA EXCELSA. 

Norfolk Island Pine. (Young Specimen.) 

ferns and numerous coniferous trees of the Coal Measures, 
known objects by which to conceive of some of the more 
prominent features of the flora of which they composed so 
large a part. We have not inadequate conceptions of at 
once the giants of its forests and the green swathe of its 
plains and hill-sides, — of its mighty trees and its dwarf 
underwood^ — of its cedars of Lebanon, so to speak, and its 
hyssop of the wall. But of an intermediate class we have 



60 



THE PALiEONTOLOGICAL 



Fig. 21., 




no existing representatives; and in this class the fossil 

botanist finds puzzles and en- 
igmas with which hitherto at 
least he has been able to deal 
with only indifferent success. 
There is a view, however, suf- 
ficiently simple, which may be 
found somewhat to lessen, if 
not altogether remove, the dif- 
ficulty. IN'ature does not dwell 
willingly in mediocrity ; and 
so in aU ages she as certainly 
produced trees, or plants of 
tree-like proportions and bulk, 
as she did minute shrubs and 
herbs. In not a few of the 
existing orders and families, 
such as the Rosaceae, the Le- 
guminosae, the Myrtacese, and 
many others, we have plants 
of all sizes, from the creeping 

Fig. 22, 





EAST INDIA TKEE-FERN.* SECTION OF STEM OF TREE-FERN. t 

{Asophila perrotetiana.) {Cyathea.) 



* Fig. 21, r a, Rachis, greatly thickened towards its base by numerous 
aerial roots, shot downwards to- the soil, and which closely cover the 
stem. 

t Fig. 22, m, Cellular tissue of the centre of rachis; d, similar tissue of 



HISTORY OF PLANTS. 61 

herb, half hidden in the sward, to the stately tree. The 
wild dwarf strawberry and minute stone-bramble are of the 
same order as our finer orchard trees, — ajpple,. pear, and 
plum, — or as those noble hawthorn, mountain ash, and 
wild cherry trees, that impart such beauty to our lawns and 
woods ; and the miuute spring vetch and everlasting pea 
are denizens of the same great family as the tall locust and 
rosewood trees, and the gorgeous laburnum. Did there 
exist no other plants than the Rosaceae or the Leguminosse, 
we would possess, notTvithstanding, herbs, shrubs, and trees, 
just as we do now. And in plants of a greatly humbler 
order we have instances of similar variety in point of size. 
The humblest grass in our meadows belongs to the same 
natural order as the tall bamboo, that, shooting up its pani- 
cles amid the jungles of India to the height of sixty feet, 
looks down upon all the second class trees of the country. 
Again, the minute forked spleenwort of Arthur Seat, which 
rarely exceeds three inches in length, is of the same family 
as those tree-ferns of 'New Zealand and Tasmania that rise 
to an elevation of jfrom twenty to thirty feet. And we know 
how in the ferns provision is made for the attafeiment and 
maintenance of the tree-like size and character. The rachis, 
which in the smaller species is either subterranean or runs 
along the ground, takes in the tree-fern a difierent direction, 
and, rising erect, climbs slowly upwards in the character of 
a trunk or stem, and sends out atop, year after year, a higher 
and yet. higher coronal of fronds. And in order to impart 
the necessary strength to this trunk, and to enable it to war 
for ages with the elements, its mass of soft cellular tissue 
is strengthened all round by ii^temal buttresses of dense 
vascular fibre, tough and elastic as the strongest woods. 

the circumference ; /, v, darkly-colored WQody fibres of great strength, the 
" internal buttresses " of the illustration ; e, the outer cortical portion 
formed by the bases of the leaves. 
6 



62 



THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 



Now, not a few of the more anomalous forms of the Coal 
Measures seem to be simply fern allies of the types Lycopo- 
dacege, Marsileaceae, arid Equisetum, that, escaping from the 
mediocrity of mere herbs, shot up into trees, — some of 
them very great trees, — and that had of necessity to be 
furnished with a tissue widely different from that of their 
minuter contemporaries and successors. It was of course 
ftn absolute mechanical necessity, that if they were to pre- 

Fig. 23. 




Fig. 25, 



LEPIDODENDRON STERNBERGII.* 



* Fig. 23, Branching stem, with hark and leaves. Fig. 24, Extremity of 
branch. Fig. 25, Extremity of another branch, with indication of cone- 
like receptacle of spores or seed. 



HISTORY OF PLANTS. 



63 



sent, by being tall and large, a wide front to the tempest, 
they should also be comparatively solid and strong to resist 
it ; but ^dth this simple mechanical requirement there seems 
to have mingled a principle of a more occult character. The 
Gymnogens or conifers vrere the highest vegetable exist- 
ences of the period, — its true trees; and aU the tree-like 
fern allies were strengthened to meet the necessities of 
their increased size, on, if I may so speak, a coniferous 
principle. Tissue resembUng that of their contemporary 
conifers imparted the necessary rigidity to their frame- 
work; nay, so strangely were they pervaded throughout 
by the coniferous characteristics, that it seems difficult to 
determine whether they really most resembled the acro- 
genous or gynmogenous families. The Lepidodendra, — 
great plants of the club moss type, that rose from fifty to 
seventy feet in height,— had well nigh as many points of 
resemblance to the coniferae as to the Lycopodites. The 



Fig. 26. 



Fig. 27. 





CALAMITES MOUGEOTII. 



SPHENOPHTLLUM DENTATUM. 



Calamites, — reed-like, jointed plants, that more nearly re- 
semble the Equisetacete than aught else which now exists, 



64 THE PALiEONTOLOGICAL 

but which attained, in the larger specimens, to the height 
of ordinary trees, also manifest very decidedly, in their 
internal structure, some of the characteristics of the coni- 
fers. It has been remarked by Lindley and Ilutton of even 
Sphenophyllum, — a genus of plants with verticillate leaves, 
of which at least six species occur in our Coal Measures, 
and which Brogniart refers to one of the humblest families 
of the fern allies, — that it seems at least as nearly related 
to the Coniferse as to its lowlier representatives, the Mar- 
sileacese. And it is this unfon of traits, pertaining to what 
are now widely separated orders, that unparts to not a few 
of the vegetables of the Coal Measures their singularly 
anomalous character. 

Let me attempt introducing you more intimately to one 
of those plants which present scarce any analogy with exist- 
ing forms, and which must have imparted so strange a 
character and appearance to the flora of the Coal Measures. 
The Sigillaria formed a numerous genus of the Carboniferous 

Fig. 28, 




SIGILLARIA KENIFORMIS. 

period: no fewer than twenty-two different species have 
been enumerated in the British coal fields alone ; and such 
was their individual abimdance, that there are great seams 
of coal which seem to be almost entirely composed of their 
remains. At least the ancient soil on which these seams 



HISTORY OF PLANTS 



65 



rest, and on which then* materials appear to have been 
elaborated from the elements, is in many instances as thickly- 
traversed by their undergromid stems as the soil occupied 
by our densest forests is traversed by the tangled roots of 
the trees by which it is covered ; and we often find associated 
with them in these cases the remains of no other plant. 
The Sigillaria were remarkable for their beautifully sculp- 
tured stems, various in their pattern, according to their 
species. All were fluted vertically, somewhat like columns 
of the Grecian Doric ; and each flute or channel had its line 
of sculpture running adown its centre. In one species {S. 
flexuosa) the sculpture consists of round knobs, surrounded 

Fig. 29. 




SIGILLARIA RENIFORMIS. 

(Nat. size.) 



by single rings, like the heads of the bolts of the ship car- 
penter ; in another {S. reniformis) the knobs are double, 
and of an oval fomi, somewhat resembUng pairs of kidneys, 
— a resemblance to which the species owes its name. In 
another species {S. catenulata) Avhat seems a minute chain 
6* 



66 



THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 



of distinctly formed elliptical links drops down the middle 
of each flute ; in yet another (S. oculata) the carvings are 
of an oval form, and, bearing each a round impression in its 



Fig. 30. 




SIGILLARIA PACHTDERMA. 

(One fourth nat. size.) 



centre, they somewhat resemble rows of staring goggle-eyes; 
while the carvings in yet another species {S. pachy derma) 
consist chiefly of crescent-shaped depressions. The roots, 
or rather underground stems, of this curious genus attracted 
notice, from their singularity, long ere their connection with 
the carved and fluted stems had been determined, and have 
been often described as the "stigmaria" of the fossil botanist. 
They, too, have their curious cai'^dngs, consisting of deeply 
marked stigmata, quincuncially arranged, \\'ith each a little 
ring at its bottom, and, in at least one rare species, surroimded 
by a sculptured star. Unlike true roots, they terminate 
abruptly ; each rootlet which they send forth was jointed to 
the little ring or dimpled knob at the bottom of the stig- 



HISTORY OF PLANTS. 67 

mata ; and the appearance of the whole, as it radiated from 
the central mass, whence the carved trmik proceeded, some- 
what resembled that of an enormous coach-wheel divested 

Fig. 31. 




STIGMARIA FICOIDES. 

(One fourth nat. size.) 

of the rim. Unfortunately we cannot yet complete our 
description of this strange plant. A specimen, traced for 
about forty feet across a shale bed, was found to bifurcate 
atop into two great branches, — a characteristic in which, vnth 
several others, it differed from most of the tree-ferns, — a 
class of plants to which Adolplie Brogniart is inclined to 
deem it related ; but no specimen has yet sho^\Ti the nature 
of its foliage. I am, however, not a little disposed to 
beUeve with Brogniart that it may have borne as leaves 
some of the supposed ferns of the Coal Measures ; nowhere, 
at least, have I found these lie so thickly, layer above layer, 
as around the stems of Sigillaria ; and the fact that, even in 
our o^Ti times, plants widely differing from the tree-ferns, 
— such, for instance, as one of the Cycadese, — should bear 
leaves scarce distinguishable from fern fronds, may well 
reconcile us to an apparent anomaly in the case of an ancient 
plant such as Sigillaria, whose entu'e constitution, so far as 
it has been ascertained, appears to have been anomalous. 
The sculj)turesque character of this richly fretted genus was 



(>8 



THE PALiEONTOLOGICAL 



Fiar. 



shared by not a few of its contemporaries. The Ulodendra, 
Avith their rectilinear rows of circular scars, and their stems 
covered with leaf-like carvings, rivalled 
in eifect the ornately relieved torus 
of a Corinthian column : Favularia, 
Knorria, Halonia, many of the Cala- 
mites, and all the Lepidodendra, ex- 
hibited the most delicate sculptm-ing. 
In walking among the ruins of this 
ancient flora, the Palaeontologist al- 
most feels as if he had got among 
the broken fragments of Italian pal- 
aces, erected long ages ago, when the 
architecture of Rome was most ornate, 
and every moulding was roughened with ornament ; and in 




FAVULATIIA TESSELLATA. 

(One fifth nat. size.) 



Fig, 33, 




LEPIDODENDRON OBOVATUM. 

(Nat, size.) 



attempting to call up in fancy the old Carboniferous forests, 



1 1 



HISTORY OF PLANTS. 



69 



he has to dwell on this peculiar feature as one of the most 

Fig, 34, Fig. 35. 




ZAMIA FENEONis. (Portland Oolite.) 
prominent, and to see, in the multitude of trunks darkened 



70 THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 

above by clouds of foliage, that rise upon him in the pros- 
pect, the slim columns of an elder Alhambra, roughened 
with arabesque tracery and exquisite filagree work. 

In the Oolitic flora we find a few peculiar features intro- 
duced. The Cycadese, — a family of plants allied to the 
ferns on the one hand, and to the conifers on the other, and 
which in their general aspect not a little resemble stunted 
palms, — appear in this flora for the first time. Its coniferous 
genera, too, receive great accessions to their numbers, and 

Fig. 37. 




MANTELLIA NIDIFORMIS. 

(Portland Dirt-bed.) 

begin to resemble, more closely than at an earlier period, 
the genera which still continue to exist. The cypresses, the 
yews, the thujas, the dammar as, aU make their earliest ap- 
pearance in the flora of the Oolite. Among our existing 
woods there seem to be but two conifers (that attain to the 
dignity of trees) indigenous to Britain, — the common yew, 
Taxus baccata^ and the common Scotch fir, Pinus sylvestris; 
and yet we know that the latter alone formed, during the 
last few centuries, great woods, that darkened for many 
miles together the now barren moors and bare hill-sides of 
the Highlands of Scotland, — moors and hill-sides that, 
though long since divested of their last tree, are still known 
by their old name of forests. In the times of the Oolite, 



HISTORY OF PLANTS. 



71 



on the other hand, Britain had from fourteen to twenty- 
different species of conifers ; and its great forests, of whose 
existence we have direct evidence in the very abundant 
lignites of the system, must have possessed a richness and 
variety which our ancient fir woods of the historic or human 
period could not have possessed. With the Conifers and 
the Cycadeae there were many ferns associated, — so many, 
that they still composed nearly tAvo fifths of the entire flora; 
and associated with these, though in reduced proportions, 




EQUISETUM COLUMNAKE. 

(Nat. size.) 



we find the fern allies. The reduction, however, of these 
last is rather in species than in individuals. The Brora 
Coal, one of the most considerable Oolitic seams in Europe, 
seems to have been formed almost exclusively of an equi. 
setum, — JE. columnare. In this flora the more equivoca\ 
productions of the Coal Measures are represented by what 
seems to be the last of the Calamites ; but it contains no 
Lepidodendra, — no Ulodendra, — no Sigillaria, — no Favu, 



72 THE PALiEONTOLOGICAL 

laria, — no Knorria or Halonia. Those monsters of the veg' 
etable world that united to the forms of its humbler produc- 
tions the bulk of trees, had, with the solitary exception of 
the Calamites, passed into extinction ; and ere the close of 
the system they too had disappeared. The forms borne by 
most of the Oolitic plants were comparatively familiar forms. 
W^ith the Acrogens and Gymnogens we find the first indica- 
don of the Liliaceae, or lily-like plants, — of plants, too, 
allied to the Pandanaceae or screw pines, the fruits of which 
are sometimes preserved in a wonderfully perfect state of 
keeping in the Inferior Oolite, together with Carpolithes, — 
palm-like fruits, very ornately sculptured, — and the remains 
of at least one other monocotyledon, that bears the some- 
what general name of an Endogenite. With these there 
occur a few disputed leaves, which I must persist in regard- 
rig. 39. Fig. 40. 




CARPOIITHES CONICA. CARPOLITHES BUCKLANDII.* 

(Reduced one third.) 

irtt; as dicotyledonous. But they formed, whatever their 
true character, a very inconspicuous feature in the OoUtic 

^ No true fossil palms have yet been detected in the great Oolitic and 
Wealden systems, though they certainly occur in the Carboniferous and 
Permian rocks, and are comparatively common in the earlier and middle 
Tertiary formations. Much cannot be founded on merely negative evidence ; 
but it would be certainly a curious circumstance should it be found that 
this graceful family, first ushered into being some time in the later Palaeo- 
zoic periods, was withdrawn from creation during the. Middle ages of the 
earth's history, to be again introduced in greatly more than the earlier pro- 
portions during the Tertiaiy and recent periods. 



HISTORY OF PLANTS. 



73 



flora; and not until the overlying Cretaceous System is 
ushered in do we find leaves in any considerable quantity 
decidedly of this high family ; nor until we enter into the 
earlier Tertiaries do we succeed in detecting a true dicoty- 
ledonous tree. On such an amount of observation is this 
order of succession determined, — though the evidence is, 
of course, mainly negative, — that when, some eight or ten 
years ago, Dr. John Wilson, the learned Free Church 
missionary to the Parsees of India, submitted to me speci- 
mens of fossil woods which he had picked up in the Egyptian 
Desert, in order that I might if possible determine their 




ACER TRILOBATUM.* 

(Miocene of (Eningen.) 



age, I told him, ere yet the optical lapidary had prepared 
them for examination, that if they exhibited the coniferous 



* Leaf of a tree allied to the maple. 



74 



THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 



structure, they might belong to any geologic period from the 
times of the Lower Old Red Sandstone downwards ; but 
that if they manifested in their tissue the dicotyledonous 
character, they could not be older than the times of the 
Tertiary. On submitting them in thin slices to the micro- 
scope, they were found to exhibit the peculiar dicotyledonous 

Fig. 42. 




ULMUS BRONNII.* 

(Miocene of Bohemia.) 



structure as strongly as the oak or chestnut. And Lieu- 
tenant Newbold's researches in the deposit in which they 
occur has since demonstrated, on stratigraphical evidence, 
that not only does it belong to the great Tertiary division, 



* Leaf of a tree allied to the chn. 



HISTORY OF PLANTS. 



75 



but also to one of the comparatively modern formations of 
the Tertiary. 

The earlier flora of this Tertiary division presents an 
aspect widely difierent from that of any of the previous 
ones. The ferns and their allies sink into their existing 
proportions ; nor do the coniferse, previously so abundant, 
occupy any longer a prominent place. On the other hand, 
the dicotyledonous herbs and trees, previously so inconspic- 
uous in creation, are largely developed. Trees of those 
Amentiferous orders to which the oak, the hazel, the beech, 
and the plane belong, were perhaps not less abundant in the 
Eocene woods than in those of the present time : they were 
mingled with trees of the Laurel, the Leguminous, and the 
Anonaceous or custard apple families, with many others; 

Fig. 43. 




PALMACITES LAMANONIS. 

(A Palm of the Miocene of Aix.) 

and deep forests, in the latitude of London (in which the 
intertropical forms must now be protected, as in the Crystal 
Palace, with coverings of glass, and warmed by artificial 
heat), abounded in graceful palms. Mr. Bowerbank found 
in the London clay of the island of Sheppey alone the fruits 



76 THE PALiEONTOLOGICAL 

of no fewer than thirteen different species of this pictm-esque 
family, which lends so peculiar a feature to the landscapes 
in which it occurs ; and ascertained that the undergrowth 
beneath was composed, in large proportion, of creeping 
plants of the gourd and melon order. From the middle or 
Miocene flora of the Tertiary division, — of which we seem 
to possess in Britain only the small but interesting fragment 
detected by his Grace the Duke of Argyll among the trap- 
beds of Mull, — most of the more exotic forms seem to 
have been excluded. The palms, however, still sur^dve in 
no fewer than thirty-one different species, and we find in 
great abundance, in the place of the other exotics, remains 
of the plane and buckthorn families, — part of a group of 
plants that in their general aspect, as sho^vn in the Tertiary 
deposits of the Continent, not a little resembled the vegeta- 
tion of the United States at the present day. The nearer 
we approach to existing times, the more famihar in form 
and outline do the herbs and trees become. We detect, as 
has been shown, at least one existing order in the ferns of 
the Coal Measures; we detect at least existing genera 
among the Coniferse, Equisetaceae, and Cycadaceae of the 
Oolite ; the acacias, gourds, and laurels of the Eocene flora, 
and the planes, avlQows, and buckthorns of the Miocene, 
though we fail to identify their species with aught that now 
lives, still more strongly remind us of the recent productions 
of our forests or conservatories ; and, on entering, in our 
doA\aiward course, the Pleistocene period, we at length find 
ourselves among familiar species. On old terrestrial sur- 
faces, that date before the times of the glacial period, and 
underlie the boulder clay, the remains of forests of oak, 
birch, hazel, and fir have been detected, — all of the familiar 
species indigenous to the country, and which still flourish 
in our native woods. And it was held by the late Professor 
Edward Forbes, that the most ancient of his five existing 



HISTORY OF PLANTS. 77 

British floras, — that which occurs in the southwest of 
Ireland, and corresponds with the flora of the northwest 
of Spain and the Pyrenees, — had been introduced into the 
country as early, perhaps, as the times of the Miocene. Be 
this, however, as it may, there can rest no doubt on the 
great antiquity of the prevailing trees of our indigenous 
forests. 

The oak, the birch, the hazel, the Scotch fir, all lived, I 
repeat, in what is now Britain, ere the last great depression 
of the land. The gigantic northern elephant and rhino- 
ceros, extinct for untold ages, forced their way through 
their tangled branches ; and the British tiger and hysena 
harbored in their thickets. Cuvier framed an argument for 
the fixity of species on the fact that the birds and beasts 
embalmed in the catacombs were identical in every respect 
with the animals of the same kinds that Hve now. But 
w^hat, it has been asked, was a brief period of three thou- 
sand years, compared with the geologic ages ? or how could 
any such argument be founded on a basis so httle extended ? 
It is, however, to no such narrow basis we can refer in 
the case of these Avoods. All human history is comprised 
in the nearer corner of the immense period w^hich they 
measure out ; and yet, from their first appearance in creation 
till now they have not altered a single fibre. And such, on 
this point, is the invariable testimony of Palaeontologic 
science, — testimony so invariable, that no great Palaeontol- 
ogist was ever yet an asserter of the development hypothe- 
sis. With the existing trees of our indigenous woods it is 
probable that in even these early times a considerable por- 
tion of the herbs of our recent fioi'a would have been asso- 
ciated, though their remains, less fitted for preservation, 
have failed to leave distinct trace behind them. We at 
least know generally, that with each succeeding period 
there appeared a more extensively useful and various vege- 
1* 



THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 

lan that which had gone before. I have already 
^d to the sombre, unproductive character of the 
earliest terrestrial flora with which we are acquainted. It 
was a flora unfitted, apparently, for the support of either 
graminivorous bird or herbivorous quadruped. The singu- 
larly profuse vegetation of the Coal Measures was, with all 
its ^n\d luxuriance, of a resembling cast. So far as appears, 
neither flock nor herd could have lived on its greenest and 
richest plains ; nor does even the flora of the Oolite seem 
to have been in the least suited for the purposes of the 
shepherd or herdsman. Not until we enter on the Tertiary 
periods do we find floras amid which man might have profit- 
ably labored as a dresser of gardens, a tiller of fields, or a 
keeper of flocks and herds. Nay, there are whole orders 
and famihes of plants of the very first importance to man 
which do not appear until late in even the Tertiary ages. 
Some degree of doubt must always attach to merely nega- 
tive evidence ; but Agassiz, a geologist whose statements 
must be received with respect by every student of the 
science, finds reason to conclude that the order of the 
Rosaceae, — an order more important to the gardener than 
almost any other, and to which the apple, the pear, the 
quince, the cherry, the plum, the peach, the apricot, the 
victorine, the almond, the raspberry, the strawberry, and 
the various brambleberries belong, together with all the 
roses and the potentillas, — was introduced only a short 
time previous to the appearance of man. And the true 
grasses, — a still more important order, which, as the corn- 
bearing plants of the agriculturist, feed at the jDresent tune 
at least two thirds of the human species, and in their hum- 
bler varieties form the staple food of the grazing animals, 
— scarce appear in the fossil state at all. They are pecu- 
liarly plants of the human period. 
Let me instance one other &mily of which the fossil bot- 



HISTORY OF PLANTS. 79 

anist has not yet succeeded in finding any trace iii even the 
Tertiary deposits, and which appears to have been specially 
created for the gratification of human sense. Unlike the 
Rosacea, it exhibits no rich blow of color, or tempting 
show of luscious fruit ; — it does not appeal very directly to 
either the sense of taste or of sight : but it is richly odorif- 
erous ; and, though deemed somewhat out of place in the 
garden for the last century and more, it enters largely uito 
the composition of some of our most fashionable perfumes. 
I refer to the Labiate family, — a family to which the 
lavenders, the mints, the thymes, and the hyssops belong, 
with basil, rosemary, and marjorum, — all plants of "gray 
renown," as Shenstone happily remarks in his description 
of the herbal of his " Schoolmistress." 

" Herbs too she knew, and well of each could speak, 
That, in her garden sipped the silvery dew, 
Where no vain flower disclosed a gaudy streak, 
But herbs for use and physic not a few, 
Of gray renown within those borders grew. 
The tufted basil, pun-provoking thyme. 
And fragrant balm, and sage of sober hue. 

******* 

"And marjorum sweet in shepherd's posie found. 
And lavender, whose spikes of azure bloom 
Shall be ercwhile in arid bundles bound. 
To lurk amid her la])ors of the loom. 
And crown her kerchiefs clean with meiklc rare perfume. 

** And here trim rosemaiy, that whilom crowned 
The daintiest garden of the proudest peer, 
Ere, driven from its envied site, it found 
A sacred shelter for its branches here. 
Where, edged with gold, its glittering skirts appear. 
With horehound gray, and mint of softer green." 

All the plants here enumerated belong to the labiate family ; 
which, though unfashionable even in Shenstone's days, have 
still their products favorably received in the very best society. 



r 



80 THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 

The rosemary, whose banishment from the gardens of the 
great he specially records, enters largely in the composition 
of eau de Cologne. Of the lavenders, one species {Laven- 
dula vera) yields the well known lavender oil, and another 
(X. latifolio) the spike oil. The peppermint {Meantha 
viridus) furnishes the essence so popular under that name 
among our confectioners ; and one of the most valued per- 
fumes of the East (next to the famous Attar^ a product of 
the Rosacese) is the oil of the Patchouly plant, another of 
the labiates. Let me indulge, ere quitting this part of the 
subject, in a single remark. There have been classes of re- 
ligionists, not wholly absent from our own country, and 
well known on the Continent, who have deemed it a merit 
to deny themselves every pleasure of sense, however inno- 
cent and delicate. The excellent but mistaken Pascal re- 
fused to look upon a lovely landscape ; and the Port Roy- 
alist nuns remarked, somewhat simply for tlieir side of the 
argument, that they seemed as if warring with Providence, 
seeing that the favors which he was abundantly showering 
upon them, they, in obedience to the stern law of their lives, 
were continually rejecting. But it is better, surely, to be 
on the side of Providence against Pascal and the nuns, than 
on the side of Pascal and the nuns against Providence. The 
great Creator, who has provided so wisely and abundantly 
for all his creatures, knows what is best for us, infinitely 
better than we do ourselves ; and there is neither sense nor 
merit, surely, in churlishly refusing to. partake of that ample 
entertainment, sprinkled with delicate perfumes, garnished 
with roses, and crowned with the most delicious fruit, which 
we now know was not only specially prepared for us, but 
also got ready, as nearly as we can judge, for the appointed 
hour of our appearance at the feast. This we also know, 
that when the Divine Man came into the world, — unlike 
the Port Royalists, he did not refuse the temperate use of 



HISTORY OF PLANTS, 



81 



any of these luxuries, not even of that "ointment of spiken- 
ard, very precious" (a product of the labiate family), with 
which Mary anointed his feet. 

Though it may at first seem a little out of place, let us an- 
ticipate here, for the sake of the illustration which it affords, 
one of the sections of the other great division of our subject, 
— that which treats of the fossil animals. Let us run briefly 
over the geologic history of insects, in order that we may 

Fig. 44. 




CYCLOPHTHALMUS BUCKLANDI. 

(A Fossil Scorpion of the Coal Measures of Bohemia.) 

mark the peculiar light which it casts on the character of 
the ancient floras. No insects have yet been detected in the 
Silurian or Old Red Sandstone Systems. They first appear 
amid the hard, dry, flowerless vegetation of the Coal Meas- 
ures, and in genera suited to its character. Among these 
the scorpions take a prominent place, — carnivorous arach- 



82 THE PAL-fflONTOLOGICAL 

nidae of ill repute, that live under stones and fallen trunks, 
and seize fast with their nippers upon the creatures on which 
they prey, crustaceans usually, such as the wood-louse, or 
insects, such as the earth-beetles and their grubs. With 
the scorpions there occur cockroaches of types not at all 
unlike the existing ones, and that, judging from their 
appearance, must have been foul feeders, to which scarce 
anything could have come amiss as food. Books, manu- 
scripts, leather, ink, oil, meat, even the bodies of the dead, 
are devoured indiscriminately by the recent JBlatta gigantea 
of the warmer parts of the globe, — one of the most dis- 
agreeable pests of the European settler, or of war vessels on 
foreign stations. I have among my books an age-em- 
browned copy of Ramsay's " Tea Table Miscellany," that 
had been carried into foreign parts by a musical relation, 
after it had seen hard service at home, and had become 
'smoke dried and black; and yet even it, though but Uttle 
tempting, as might be thought, was not safe from the cock- 
roaches ; for, finding it left open one day, they ate out in 
half an hour half its table of contents, consisting of several 
leaves. Assuredly, if the ancient Blattce were as little nice 
in their eating as the devourers of the "Tea Table Miscel- 
lany," they would not have lacked food amid even the un- 
productive flora and meagre fauna of the Coal Measures. 
"With these ancient cockroaches a few locusts and beetles 
have been found associated, together with a small Tinea., — 
a creature allied to the common clothes-moth, and a Plias- 
mia^ — a creature related to the spectre insects. But the 
group is an inconsiderable one; for insects seem to have 
occupied no very conspicuous place in the carboniferous 
fauna. The beetles appear to have been of the wood and 
seed devouring kinds, and would probably have found their 
food among the conifers; the PhasmidcB and grasshoppers 
would have lived on the tender shoots of the less rigid 



HISTORY OF PLANTS. 83 

plants their contemporaries ; the Tinea^ probably on ligne- 
ous or cottony fibre. Not a single insect has the system 
yet produced of the now numerous kinds that seek their 
food among flowers. In the Oolitic ages, however, insects 
become greatly more numerous, — so numerous that they 
seemed to have formed almost exclusively the food of the 
earliest mammals, and apparently also of some of the flying 
reptiles of the time. The magnificent dragon-flies, the car- 
Fig. 45. 




FOSSIL DRAGON-FLY. 

Solenhofen. 

nivorous tyrants of their race, were abundant ; and we now 
know, that while they were, as their name indicates, dragons 
to the weaker insects, they themselves were devoured by 
dragons as truly such as were ever yet feigned by romancer 
of the middle ages. Ants were also common, with crickets, 
grasshoppers, bugs both of the land and water, beetles, two- 
winged flies, and, in species distinct from the preceding 



84 THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 

carboniferous ones, the disgusting cockroaches. And for 
the first time amid the remains of a flora that seems to have 
liad its few flowers, — though flowers could have formed no 
conspicuous feature in even an Oolitic landscape, — we 
detect in a few broken fragments of the wings of butterflies, 
decided trace of the flower-sucking insects. "Not, however, 
until we enter into the great Tertiary division do these 
become numerous. The first bee makes its appearance in 
the amber of the Eocene, locked up hermetically in its gem- 
like tomb, — an embalmed corpse in a crystal cofiin, — 
along with fragments of flower-bearing herbs and trees. 
The first of the Bombycidse too, — insects that may be seen 
suspended over flowers by the scarce visible vibrations of 
their wings, sucking the honied juices by means of their 
long, slender trunks, — also appear in the amber, associated 
with moths, butterflies, and a few caterpillars. Bees and 
butterflies are present in increased proportions in the latter 
Tertiary deposits ; but not until that terminal creation to 
which we ourselves belong was ushered on the scene did 
they receive their fullest development. There is exquisite 
poetry in Wordsworth's reference to " the soft murmur of 
the vagrant bee," — 

" A slender sound, yet hoary Time 
Dotli to the soul exalt it -svith the chime 
Of all his years ; a company 
Of ages coming, ages gone, 
Nations from before them sweeping." 

And yet, mayhap, the naked scientific facts of the history 
of this busy insect are scarcely less poetic than the pleasmg 
imagination of the poet regarding it. They tell that man- s 
world, with all its griefs and troubles, is more emphatically 
a world of flowers than any of the creations that preceded 
it; and that as one great family — the grasses — were 



in Ji 



HISTORY OF PLANTS. 85 

called into existence, in order, apparently, that he might 
enter in favoring circumstances upon his two earliest avoca- 
tions, and be in good hope a keeper of herds and a tiller of 
the ground; and as another family of plants — the Rosaceae 
' — was created in order that the gardens which it would be 
also one of his vocations to keep and to dress should have 
their trees " good for food and pleasant to the taste ; " so 
flowers in general were profusely produced just ere he 
appeared, to minister to that sense of beauty which distin- 
guishes him from all the lower creatures, and to which he 
owes not a few of his most exquisite enjoyments. The poet 
accepted the bee as a sign of high significance : the geolo- 
gist also accepts her as a sign. Her entombed remains 
testify to the gradual fitting up of our earth as a place of 
habitation for a creature destined to seek delight for the 
mind and the eye as certainly as for the grosser senses, and 
in especial marks the mtroduction of the stately forest 
*rees, and the arrival of the dehcious flowers. And, 

" Thus in their stations lifting toward the sky 
The foliaged head in cloud-like majesty, 
The shadow-casting race of trees survive : 
Thus in the train of spring arrive 
Sweet flowers : what living eye hath viewed 
Their myriads ? endlessly renewed 
Wherever strikes the sun's glad ray. 
Where'er the subtile waters stray, 
Wherever sportive zephyrs bend 
Their course, or genial showers descend." 
8 



LECTURE SECOND. 

THE PALiEONTOLOGICAL HISTORY OF ANIMALS. 

Amid tlie unceasing change and endless variety of nature 
there occur certain great radical ideas, that, while they 
form, if I may so express myselfj the groundwork of the 
change, — the basis of the variety, — admit in themselves 
of no change or variety whatever. They constitute the 
aye-enduring tissue on which the ever-changing patterns of 
creation are inscribed : the patterns are ever varying ; the 
tissue which exhibits them for ever remains the same. In 
the animal kingdom, for instance, the prominent ideas have 
always been uniform. However much the faunas of the 
various geologic periods may have differed from each other, 
or from the fauna which now exists, in their general aspect 
and character, they were all, if I may so speak, equally 
underlaid by the great leading ideas which still constitute 
the master types of animal life. And these leading ideas 
are four in number. Firsts there is the star-like type of 
life, — life embodied in a form that, as in the corals, the 
sea-anemones, the sea-urcliins, and the star-fishes, radiates 
outwards from a centre ; second^ there is the articulated 
type of life, — Hfe embodied in a form composed, as in the 
worms, crustaceans, and insects, of a series of rings united 
by their edges, but more or less moveable on each other ; 
thirds there is the bilateral or molluscan type of life, — life 
embodied in a form in which tliere is a duality of corre- 
sponding parts, ranged, as in the cuttle-fishes, the clams, and 



HISTORY OF ANIMALS. 87 

the snails, on the sides of a central axis or plane; and 
fourth^ there is the vertebrate type of life, — life embodied 
in a form in which an internal skeleton is built up into two 
cavities placed the one over the other ; the upper for the 
reception of the nervous centres, cerebral and spmal, — the 
lower for the lodgment of the respiratory, circulatory, and 
digestive organs. Such have been the four central ideas 
of the faunas of every succeeding creation, except perhaps 
the earliest of all, that of the Lower Silurian System, in 
which, so far as is yet kno^vn, only three of the number 
existed, — the radiated, articulated, and molluscan ideas or 
types. That Omnipotent Creator, infinite in his resources, 
— who, in at least the details of his workings, seems never 
yet to have repeated himself, but, as Lyell well expresses it, 
breaks, when the parents of a species have been moulded, 
the dye in which they were cast, — manifests himself, in 
these four great ideas, as the unchanging and unchangeable 
One. They serve to bind together the present mth all the 
past ; and determine the miity of the authorship of a won- 
derfully complicated design, executed on a groimdwork 
broad as time, and whose scope and bearing are deep as 
eternity. 

The fauna of the Silurian System bears in all its three 
great types the stamp of a fashion peculiarly antique, and 
which, save in a few of the moUusca, has long since become 
obsolete. Its radiate animals are chiefly corals, simple or 
compound, whose inhabitants may have somewhat re- 
sembled the sea-anemones ; with zoophites, akin mayhap to 
the sea-pens, though the relationship must have been a 
remote one ; and numerous crinoids, or stone lilies, some 
of which consisted of but a sculptured calyx without petals, 
while others threw off a series of long, flexible arms, that 
divided and subdivided like the branches of a tree, and 
were thickly flinged by hair-like fibres. There is great 



88 



THE PALiEOXTOLOGICAL 



Fig. 46. 




CYATHAXONIA DALMANI. 



Fig. 47. 



variety and beauty among these Silurian crinoids; and, 

from the ornate sculpture of 
their groined and ribbed cap- 
itals and slender columns^ the 
Gotliic architect might borrow 
not a few striking ideas. 

The difFarence between the 
older and newer fashions, as 
exempliiied in the cup-shaped 
corals, may be indicated in a 
single sentence. The ancient 
corals were stars of four rays, or of multiples of four ; the 

modern corals are stars of six 
rays, or of multiples of six. 
But though, at a certain definite 
period, — that during wliich the 
great Paheozoic division ended 
and the Secondary division be- 
gan — nature, in forming this 
class of creatures, discarded the 
number four, and adopted in- 
stead the number six, the great 
leading idea of the star itself 
Avas equally retained in corals 
of the modern as in those of 
the more ancient type. 
The articulata of the Silurian period bore a still more 
peculiar character. They consisted mainly of the Trilobites, 
— a family in whose nicely-jointed shells the armorer of 
the middle ages might have found almost all the contri- 
vances of his craft anticipated, with not a few besides which 
he had failed to discover; and which, after receiving so 
immense a development during the middle and later times 
of the Silurian period, that whole rocks were formed almost 




OLYPTOCRINUS DECADACTYLUS. 

(Hudson River Group, 
Lower Silurian.) 



HISTORY OF ANIMALS. 



89 



exclusively of theii* remains, gradually died out in the times 
of the Old Red Sandstone, and disappeared for ever from 
creation after the Carboniferous Limestone had been de- 
Fig. 48. 




CALTMENE BLITMENBACHII. 



posited. The Paleontologist knows no more unique family 
than thr.t of the Trilobites, or a family more unlike any 
which now exists, or a family which marks vdih more 



Fig. 49. 



Fig. 50. 



Fig. 61. 




OBTHISINA VERNEUILI. LITTJITES COKNTr-ABIETIS. LINGULA LOWISII. 



certainty the early rocks in which they occur. And yet, 
though formed in a fashion that perished myriads of ages 
8* 



90 THE PALiEONTOLOGICAL 

ago, how admirably does it not exhibit the articulated type 
of being, and illustrate that unity of design which, amid 
endless diversity, pervades all nature. The moUusca of the 
Silurians ranged from the high cephalopoda, represented in 
our existing seas by the nautili and the cuttle-fishes, to the 
low brachipods, some of whose congeners may still be de- 
tected in the tercbratula of our Highland lochs and bays, 
and some in the lingula3 of the southern hemisphere. The 
cephalopods of the system are all of an obsolete type, that 
disappeared myriads of ages ago, — a remark which, with 
the exceptions just intimated, and perhaps one or two 
others, applies equally to its brachipods ; but of at least tAvo 
of its intermediate families, — the gasteropoda and lamelli- 
branchiata, — several of the forms resemble those of recent 
shells of the temperate latitudes. In its general aspect, 
however, the Silurian fauna, antiquely fashioned, as I have 
said, as became its place in the primeval ages of existence, 
was unlike any other which the Avorld ever saw ; and the 
absence of the vertebrata, or at least the inconspicuous 
place which they occupied if they were at all present, must 
have imparted to the whole, as a group, a humble and 
mediocre character. It seems to have been for many ages 
together a creation of molluscs, corals, and Crustacea. At 
length, in an upper bed of the system, immediately under 
the base of the Old Red Sandstone, the remams of the 
earliest known fishes aj^pear, blent with what also appears 
for the first time, — the fragmentary remains of a terrestrial 
vegetation. The rocks beneath this ancient bone- bed have 
yielded, as I have already said, no trace of any plant liigher 
than the Thallogens, or at least not higher than the Zos- 
teracea, — plants whose proper habitat is the sea; but, 
through an apparently simultaneous advance of the two 
kingdoms, animal and vegetable, — though of course the 
simultaneousness maybe but merely apparent, — the first 



HISTORY OF ANIMALS. 91 

Hnd plants and the first vertebrates appear together in the 
same deposit. 

What, let us mquire, is the character of these ancient 
fishes, that first comiDlete the scale of animated nature in its 
four master ideas, hy addmg the vertebrate to the inverte- 
brate divisions ? So far as is yet kno^^ii, they all consist of 
one well marked order, — that placoidal order of Agassiz 
that to an internal IrameAvork of cartilage adds an external 
armature, consisting of plates, spmes, and shagreen points 
of solid bone. Eitlicr of the two kmds of dog-fishes on our 
coasts, — the spiked or spotted, — may be accepted as not 
inadequate representatives of this order as it now exists. 
The Port Jackson shark, however. — a creatm'e that to the 

Fig. 52. 




PORT JACKSO>r SHAKK. 

(Cestracion Phillip pi.) 

dorsal spines and shagreen-covered skin of the common 
dog-fish adds a mouth terminal at the snout, not placed 
beneath, as in most other sharks, and a palate covered with 
a dense pavement of crushing teeth, — better illustrates tlie 
order as it first appeared in creation than any of our British 
placoids. 

And here let me adduce another and very remarkable 
instance of the correspondence which obtains between the 
sequence in which certain classes of organisms were first 
ushered into being, and the order of classification adopted, 



92 THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 

after many revisions, by the higher naturalists. Cuvier, 
with not a few of the ichthyologists who preceded him, 
arranged the fishes into two distinct series, — the Cartila- 
ginous and Osseous ; and these last he mainly divided into 
the hard or spiny-finned fishes, and the soft or joint-finned 
fishes. He placed the sturgeon in his Cartilaginous series ; 
while in his soft-finned order he found a place for the Polyp- 
terus of the Nile and the Lepidosteus of the Ohio and St. 
Lawrence. But the arrangement, though it seemed at the 
time one of the best and most natural possible, failed to 
meet any corresponding arrangement m the course of 
geologic history. The place assigned to the class of fishes 
as a whole corresponded to their place in the Palaeontological 
scale ; — first of the vertebrate division in the order of their 
appearance, they border, as in the " Animal Kingdom " of 
the naturalist, on the invertebrate divisions. But it was 
not until the new classification of Agassiz had ranged them 
after a different fashion that the correspondence became 
complete in all its parts. First, he erected the fishes that to 
an internal cartilaginous skeleton unite an external armature 
of plates and points of bone, into his Placoid order ; next, 
gathering together a mere liandful of individuals from 
among the various orders and families over Avhich they had 
been scattered, — the sturgeons from among the cartilagi- 
nous fishes, and the lepidosteus and polypterus fi-om among 
the Clupia or herrings, — he erected into a small ganoid 
order all the fishes that are covered, whatever the consis- 
tency of their skeleton, by a continuous or nearly continu- 
ous armor of enamelled bone, or by great bony plates that 
lock into each other at their edges. Out of the remaining 
fishes, — those covered with scalej of a lioniy substance, 
and which now conipiiso nearly nine tenths of the whole 
class, — he erected two orders more, — a Ctenoid order, 
consisting of fishes whose scales, like those of the perch, are 



HISTORY OF AXIMALS 



93 



pectinated at their loTver edges like the teeth of a coml", 
and a Cycloid order, composed of fishes whose scales, lil^e 



Fi>. .53.* 



Silurian. 
Old Red. 

Carboniferous. 

Permian. 
Triassic. 

Oolitic. 
Cretaceous. 

Tertiary. 



.Placoid. 
Ganoid. 



Ctenoid and Cycloid. 



Geologic [PLi. Gan. Cte. Cyc] arrangement. 

Agassiz's [Pla. Gan. Cte. Cyc] arrangement. 

THE GENEALOGY OF FISHES. 

those of the salmon, are defined all around by a simple con- 
tinuous margin : and no sooner was the division effected 
than it was found to cast a singularly clear light on the 
early history of the class. The earliest fishes — firstborn 
of their family — seem to have been all placoids. The 
Silurian System has not yet afforded trace of any other ver- 
tebral animal. With the Old Red Sandstone the ganoids 
were ushered upon the scene in amazing abundance ; and for 
untold ages, comprising mayhap millions of years, the entire 
ichthyic class consisted, so far as is yet known, of but these 

* Here, as in the former diagrams (Figs. 1 and 4), the horizontal lines 
represent the divisions of the great geologic systems ; while the vertical 
lines indicate the sweep of the several orders of fishes across the scale, and 
the periods, so far as has yet been determine^, of their first occurrence la 
creatioiL 



94 



THE PALiEONTOLOGICAL 



two orders. During the times of the Old Red Sandstone, 
of the Carboniferous, of the Permian, of the Triassic, and 



i-ig. 54. 




AMBLYPTERUS MACROPTERTTS. 

From the Coal at SaarbracK:. 
(A Ganoid of the Carboniferous System.) 

of the Oolitic Systems, all fishes, though apparently as 

Fi^. 55. 




liEBIAS OEPHALOTES. 

Cycloids of Aix. (Miocene.) 



numerous individually as they are now, were comprised in 
the ganoidal and placoidal orders. The period of these 



HISTORY OF ANIMALS. 



95 



orders seems to have been nearly correspondent with the 
reign, in the vegetable kingdom, of the Acrogens and 

Fipr. 56. 




PLATAX ALTI8SIMUS. 

A Ctenoid of Monte Bolca. {Eocene.) 

Gymnogens, with the intermediate classes, their allies. At 
length, during the ages of the Chalk, the Cycloids and 



96 THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 

Otenoids were ushered in, and were gradually developed in 
creation until the human period, in which they seem to 
have reached their culminating point, and now many times 
exceed in number and importance all other fishes. We do 
not see a sturgeon (our British representative of the 
ganoids) once in a twelvemonth ; and though the skate and 
dog-fish (our representatives of the placoids) are greatly less 
rare, their number bears but a small proportion to that of 
the fishes belonging to the two prevaihng orders, of which 
thousands of boat-loads are landed on our coasts every day. 
The all but entire disappearance of the ganoids from 
creation is surely a curious and not unsuggestive circum- 
stance. In the human family there are races that have long 
since reached their culminating point, and are now either 
fast disappearing or have already disappeared. The Aztecs 
of Central America, or the Copts of the valley of the Nile, 
are but the inconsiderable fragments of once mighty nations, 
memorials of whose greatness live in the vast sepulchral 
mounds of the far West, or in the temples of Thebes or 
Luxor, or the pyramids of Gizah. But in the rivers of these 
very countries, — in the Polypterus of the Nile, or the Le- 
pidosteus of the Mississippi, — we are presented with the 
few surviving fragments of a dynasty compared* with which 
that of Egypt or of Central America occupied but an 
exceedingly small portion of either space or time. The 
dynasty of the ganoids was at one time coextensive with 
every river, lake, and sea, and endured during the un- 
reckoned eo7is which extended from the times of the Lower 
Old Red Sandstone until those of the Chalk. I may here 
mention, that as there are orders of plants, such as the 
Rosacese and the Grasses, that scarce preceded man in their 
appearance, so there are families of fishes that seem pecu- 
liarly to belong to the human period. Of these, there is a 
family very familiar on our coasts, and which, though it 



HISTORY OF ANIMALS. 97 

fiimishes none of our higher ichthyic luxuries, is remarkable 
for the numbers of the human family which it pro\ddes 
with a wholesome and palatable food. The delicate Sal- 
nionidse and the Pleuronectidae, — families to which the 
salmon and turbot belong, — were ushered into being as 
early as the times of the Chalk ; but the Gadidge or cod 
family, — that family to which the cod proper, the haddock, 
the dorse, the whiting, the coal-fish, the pollock, the hake, 
the torsk, and the ling belong, with many other useful and 
wholesome species, — did not precede man by at least any 
period of time appreciable to the geologist. No trace of 
the family has yet been detected in even the Tertiary rocks. 
Of the ganoids of the second age of vertebrate existence, 
— that of the Old Red Sandstone, — some were remarkable 
for the strangeness of their foi-ms, and some for constituting 
links of connection which no longer exist in nature, between 
the ganoid and placoid orders. The Acanth family, which 
ceased with the Coal Measures, was characterized, especially 
in its Old Red species, by a combination of traits common 
to both orders ; and among the extremer forms, in which 
Palaeontologists for a time failed to detect that of the fish 
at all, we reckon those of the genera Coccosteus, Pterich- 
thys, and Cephalaspis. The more aberrant genera, however, 
even while they consisted each of several species, were 
comparatively short lived. The Coccosteus and Cephalaspis 
were restricted to but one formation apiece ; while the 
Pterichthys, which appears for the first time in the lower 
deposits of the Old Red Sandstone, becomes extinct at its 
close. On the other hand, some of the genera that exem- 
plified the general type of their class were extremely long 
Uved. The Celacanths were reproduced in many various 
species, from the times of the Lower Old Red Sandstone to 
those of the Chalk ; and the Cestracions, which appear in 
the Upper Ludlow Rocks as the oldest of fishes, continue 
9 



98 THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 

in at least one species to exist still. It would almost seem 
as if some such law influenced the destiny of genera in this 

Fig. 57. 




PTERICHTHTS OBLONGUS. 
(One half nat. size.) 

ichthyic class, as that which we find so often exemplified in 
our species. The dwarf, or giant, or deformed person, is 
seldom a long hver ; — all the more remarkable instances of 
longevity have been furnished by individuals cast in the 
ordinary mould and proportions of the species, l^ot a few 
of these primordial ganoids were, however, of the highest 
rank and standing ever exemplified by their class ; and we 
find Agassiz boldly assigning a reason for their superiority 
to their successors, important for the fact which it embodies, 
and worthy, as coming from him, of our most respectful 
attention. "It is plain," we find him saying, "that before 



HISTORY OF ANIMALS. 99 

the class of reptiles was introduced upon our globe, the 
fishes, being then the only representatives of the type of 
vertebrata, were invested Avith the characters of a higher 
order, embodying, as it were, a prospective view of a higher 
development in another class, which was introduced as a 
distinct type only at a later period; and from that time the 
reptilian character, which had been so prominent in the old- 
est fishes, was gradually reduced, till in more recent periods, 
and in the present creation, the fishes lost all this herpeto- 
logical relationsliip, and were at last endowed with characters 
which contrast as mucli, when compared with those of rep- 
tiles, as they agreed closely in the beginning. Lepidosteus 
alone reminds us in om- time of these old-fashioned characters 
of the class of fishes as it Avas in former days." 

The ancient fishes seem to have received their fullest 
development during the Carboniferous period. Their num- 
ber was very great: some of them attained to an enormous 
size, and, though the true reptile had already appeared, 
they continued to retain, till the close of the system, the 
high reptihan character and organization. Kothing, how- 
ever, so impresses the observer as the formidable character 
of the offensive Aveapons with which they Avere furnished, 
and the amazing strength of their defensive armature. I 
need scarce say, that the Palaeontologist finds no trace hi 
nature of that golden age of the world, of which the poets 
delighted to sing, when all creatures lived together in 
unbroken peace, and war and bloodshed Avere unknoAvn. 
Ever since animal life began upon our planet, there existed, 
in all the departments of being, carnivorous classes, who 
could not live but by the death of their neighbors, and who 
Avere armed, in consequence, for their destruction, like the 
butcher with his axe and knife, and the angler Avith his 
hook and spear. But there were certain periods in the 
history of the past, during which these weapons assumed a 



100 



THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 



PLETJT? ACANTHUS 

L/EVISSIMUS. 

{Conl Mca.virrs.) 
(Half uat. size.) 



more formidable aspect than at others; 
and never were they more formidable than 
in the times of the Coal Measures. The 
teeth of the Rhizodus — a ganoidal fish of 
our coal fields — Avere more sharp and 
trenchant than those of the crocodile of 
the Nile, and m the larger specimens fully 
four times the bulk and size of the teeth 
of the liugest reptile of this species that 
now lives. The dorsal spine of its contem- 
porary, the Gyracanthus, a great placoid, 
much exceeded in size that of any existing 
fish : it was a mighty spear head, ornately 
carved hke that of a New Zealand chief, 
but in a style that, when he first saw a 
specimen in my collection, greatly excited 
the admiration of Mr. Ruskin. But one 
of the most remarkable weapons of the 
period was the sting of the Pleuracanthus, 
another great placoid of the age of gigan- 
tic fishes. It was sharp and polished as 
a stiletto, but, from its rounded form and 
dense structure, of great strength ; and 
along two of its sides, from the taper pomt 
to Avithin a few inches of the base, there 
ran a thickly-set row of barbs, hooked 
downwards, like the thorns that bristle 
on the young shoots of the wild rose, and 
which must have rendered it a weapon 
not merely of destruction, but also of tor- 
ture. The defensive armor of the j^eriod, 
especially that of its ganoids, seems to 
have been as remarkable for its powers of 
resistance as the offensive must have been 



HISTORY OF ANIMALS 101 

for their potency in the assault ; and it seems probable that 
in the great strength of the bony and enamelled armature 
of this order of fishes we have the secret of the extremely 
formidable character of the teeth, spines, and stings that 
coexisted along with it. 

Such of the fishes of the present time as live on Crustacea 
and the shelled molluscs, — such as the Wrasse or rock-fish 
family, and at least one of the Goby family, the sea-wolf, — 
have an apparatus of crushing teeth greatly more solid and 
strong than the teeth of such of their contemporaries as are 
either herbivorous or feed on the weaker families of their 
owm class. A similar remark applies to the ancient sharks, 
as contrasted with those of later times. So long as the 
strongly-armed ganoidal order prevailed in nature, the sharks 
were furnished with massive crushing teeth; but when the 
ganoids waned in creation, and the soft-scaled cycloid and 
ctenoid orders took and amply filled the place which they 
had left vacant, the well known modern form of sharks' 

Fig. 59. Fig. 60 



A 




CARCHAUIAS PRODUCTUS. PLACODUS GIGAS, 

Cutting Tooth, {Miocene.) Crushing Teeth. {Trias.) 

teeth was introduced, — a form much rather suited for cutting 
soft bodies than for crushing hard ones. In fine, the offensive 
weapons of the times of the Coal Measui-es seem very for. 
9* 



102 THE PALiEONTOLOGlCAL 

midable, just as those personal weapons of the middle ages 
seem so that were borne at a time when every soldier took 
the field cased in armor of proof. The slim scimitar or 
slender rapier would have availed hut little against mas- 
sive iron helmets or mail coats of tempered steel. And so 
the warriors of the period armed themselves with ponderous 
maces, battle-axes as massive as hammers, and double- 
handed swords of great weight and strength. 

Before passing onwards to other and higher classes and 
orders, as they occurred in creation, permit me to make the 
formidable armor of the earlier fishes, offensive and defen- 
sive, the subject of a single remark. We are told by 
Goethe, in his autobiography, that he had attained his 
sixth year when the terrible earthquake at Lisbon took 
place, — " an event," he says, " which greatly disturbed " 
his " peace of mind for the first time." He could not rec- 
oncile a catastrophe so suddenly destructive to thousands, 
with the ideas which he had already formed for himself of 
a Providence all-powerful and all-benevolent. But he after- 
wards learned, he tells us, to recognize in such events the 
'•''God of the Old Testament?'' I know not in what spirit 
the remark was made ; but this I know, that it is the God 
of the Old Testament whom we see exhibited in all nature 
and all providence ; and that it is at once wisdom and duty 
in his rational creatures, however darkly they may perceive 
or imperfectly they may comprehend, to hold in implicit 
faith that the Adorable Monarch of all the past and of all 
the future is a King who " can do no wrong." This early 
exhibition of tooth, and spine, and sting, — of weajjons 
constructed alike to cut and to pierce, — to unite two of 
the most indispensable requirements of the modern ar- 
morer, — a keen edge to a strong back, — nay, stranger still, 
the examples furnished in this primeval time, of weapons 
formed not only to kill, but also to torture, — must be alto- 



HISTORY OF ANIMALS. 103 

gether at variance with the preconceived opinions of those 
who hold that until man appeared in creation, and dark- 
ened its sympathetic face with tlie stain of moral gnilt, the 
reign of violence and outrage did not begin, and that there 
was no death among the inferior creatures, and no snlfering. 
But preconceived opinion, whether it hold fast, with Lac- 
tantius and the old Schoolmen, to the belief that there can 
be no antipodes, or assert, with Caccini and Bellarmine, 
that our globe hangs lazily in the midst of the heavens, 
while the sun mo-s'es round it, must yield ultimately to 
scientific truth. And it is a truth as certain as the e^xist- 
ence of a southern hemisphere, or the motion of the earth 
round both its own axis and the great solar centre, that, 
untold ages ere man had sinned or suifered, the animal 
creation exhibited exactly its present state of war, — that 
the strong, armed mth formidable weapons, exquisitely 
constructed to kill, preyed upon the weak ; and that the 
weak, sheathed, many of them, in defensive armor equally 
admirable m its mechanism, and ever increasing and nmlti- 
plying upon the earth far beyond the requirements of the 
mere maintenance of their races, Avere enabled to escape, as 
species, the assaults of the tyrant tribes, and to exist un- 
thinned for unreckoned ages. It has been Aveakly and 
impiously urged, — as if it were merely with the geologist 
that men had to settle this matter, — that such an economy 
of warfare and suffering, — of warring and of being warred 
upon, — would be, in the words of the infant Goethe, im- 
worthy of an all-powerful and all-benevolent Providence, 
and in effect a libel on his government and character. But 
that grave charge we leave the objectors to settle with the 
great Creator himself. Be it theirs, not ours, according to 
the poet, to 

" Snatch from his hand the balance and the rod, 
Kludge his justice, he the god of God." 



104 THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 

Be it enough for the geologist rightly to interpret the 
record of creation, — to declare the truth as he finds it, — 
to demonstrate, from evidence no clear intellect ever yet 
resisted, that he, the Creator, from whom even the young 
lions seek their food, and who giveth to all the beasts, great 
and small, their meat in due season, ever wrought as he 
now works in his animal kingdom, — that he gave to the 
primeval fishes their spines and their stings, — to the pri- 
meval reptiles their trenchant teeth and their strong armor 
of bone, — to the primeval mammals their great tusks and 
their sharp claws, — that he of old divided all his creatures, 
as now, into animals of prey and the animals preyed upon, 
— that from the beginning of things he inseparably estab- 
lished among his non-responsible existences the twin laws 
of generation and of death, — nay, fiirther, passing from 
the established truths of Geologic to one of the best estab- 
lished truths of Theologic science, — God's eternal justice 
and truth, — let us assert, that in the Divine government 
the matter of fact always determines the question of right, 
and that whatever has been done- by him who rendereth 
no account to man of his matters, he had in all ages, and 
in all places, an unchallengeable right to do. 

The oldest knoT^m reptiles appear just a little before the 
close of the Old Red Sandstone, just as the oldest known 
fishes appeared just a little before the close of the Silurian 
System. What seems to be the Upper Old Red of our 
o^vn country, though there still hangs a shade of doubt on 
the subject, has furnished the remains of a small reptile, 
equally akin, it would appear, to the lizards and the batra- 
chians ; and what seems to be the Upper Old Red of the 
United States has exhibited the foot-tracks of a larger 
animal of the same class, which not a little resemble those 
which would be impressed on recent sand or clay by the 
alligator of the Mississippi, did not the alligator of the 



HISTORY OF ANIMALS. 105 

Mississippi efface its own footprints (a consequence of the 
shortness of its legs) by the trail of its abdomen. In the 
Coal Measures, the reptiles hitherto found, — and it is still 
little more than ten years since the first was detected, — 
are all allied, though not without a cross of the higher 
crocodilian or lacertian nature, to the batrachian order, — 
that lowest order of the reptiles to which the frogs, newts, 
and salamanders belong. These reptiles of the carbonifer- 
ous era, though only a few twelvemonths ago we little sus- 
pected the fact, seem to have been not very rare in our own 
neighborhood. My attention was called some time since 
by Mr. Henry Cadell, — an intelligent practical geologist, 

— to certain appearances in one of the Duke of Buccleuch's 
coal pits near Dalkeith, which he regarded as the tracks of 
air-breathmg quadrupeds ; and, after examining a specimen, 
containing four footprints, which he had brought above 
ground, and which not a little excited my curiosity, we 
visited the pit together. And there, in a side working 
about half a mile from the pit mouth, and about four hun- 
dred feet under the surface, I found the roof of the coal, 
which rose at a high angle, traversed by so many foot- 
tracks, upwards, downwards, and athwart, that it cost me 
some httle care to trace the individual lines. At least one 
of the number, however, — consisting of eleven footprints 
of the right and as many of the left foot — I was able to 
trace from side to side of the working, a distance of four 
yards ; and several of the others for shorter spaces. The 
prints, which were reverses or casts in a very coarse sand- 
stone, were about thu'teen inches apart across the creature's 
chest, and rather more than a foot apart fi'om its fore to its 
hinder limbs. They were alternately larger and smaller, 

— the smaller (those of the fore feet) measuring about four 
inches in length, and the larger (those of the hinder feet) 
about six inches. The number of toes seemed to be alter- 



106 THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 

nately four and five ; but from the circumstance that the 
original matrix on which the tracks had been impressed, — 
a micaceous clay resolved into a loose fissile sandstone, — 
had fallen away in the working of the pit, leaving but the 
boldly-relieved though ill-defined casts on the coarse sand- 
stone, I could not definitely determine the point. Enough, 
how^ever, remained to show that at that spot, — little more 
than a mile from where the Duke of Buccleuch's palace now 
stands, — large reptiles had congregated in considerable 
numbers shortly after the great eight feet coal seam of the 
Dalkeith basin had been formed. In another part of the 
pit I found foot-tracks of apparently the same animal in 
equal abundance, but still less distinct in their state of 
keeping. But they bore testimony with the others to the 
comparative abundance of reptilian life at an early period, 
when the coal-bearing strata of the empire were little more 
than half deposited. It was not, however, until the Per- 
mian and Triassic Systems had come to a close, and even 
the earlier ages of the Oolitic System had passed away, 
that t*he class received its fullest development in creation. 
And certainly very wonderful was the development which 
it then did receive. Reptiles became everywhere the lords 
and masters of this lower world. When any class of 
the air-breathing vertebrates is very largely developed, we 
find it taking possession of all the three old terrestrial ele- 
ments, — earth, air, and water. The human period, for 
instance, like that which immediately preceded it, is pecu- 
liarly a period of mammals ; and we find the class, free^ if I 
may so express myself, of the three elements, disputing 
possession of the sea wdth the fishes, in its Cetaceans, its 
seals, and its sea-lions, and of the air with the birds, in its 
numerous genera -of the bat family. Further, not until the 
great mammahferous period is fairly ushered in do either 
the bats or the whales make their appearance in creation. 



HISTORY OF ANIMALS. 



107 



Remains of Oolitic reptiles have been mistaken in more 
than one instance for those of Cetacea ; but it is now gener- 
ally held that the earUest kno^vTi specimens of the family 
belong to the Tertiary ages, while those of the oldest bats 



Fig. 61. 




VESPERTILIO PARISIENSIS. 

A Bat of the Eocene. 

occur in the Eocene of the Paris Basin, associated with 
the bones of dolphins, lamantines, and morses. Now, in 
the times of the Oolite it was the reptihan class that pos- 

Fig. 62 




ICHTHYOSAURUS COMMUNIS. 

(Lias.) 



sessed itself of all the elements. Its gigantic enaliosaurs, 
huge reptihan whales mounted on paddles, were the tyrants 



108 



THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 



of the ocean, and must have reigned supreme over the 
already reduced class of fishes ; its pterodactyles, — drag- 



Fig. 63, 




PLESIOSAURUS DOLICHODEIRUS. 

iUas.) 



ons as strange as were ever feigned by romancer of the 



Fior 64 




PTERODACTYLUS CRASSIROSTRIS. 

(Oolite.) 



middle ages, and that to the j:iws and teeth of ^the croco- 
dile added the wings of a hat and the body and tail of an 



HI ST 11 Y OF ANIMALS. 109 

ordinary mammal, had " the power of the air," and, pur- 
suing the fleetest insects in their flight, captured and bore 
them doTVTi ; * its lakes and rivers abounded in crocodiles 
and fresh water tortoises of ancient type and flishion ; and 
its woods and plains were the haunts of a strange reptilian 
fauna of what has been well termed " fearfully great lizards," 
'^- some of which, such as the iguanodon, rivalled the largest^j 
elephant in height, and greatly more than rivalled him in 
length and bulk. Judging from what remams, it -seems not 
improbable that the reptiles of this Oolitic period were 

Fig. 65. 




CHELONIA BENSTEDI. 

(Chalk.) 

quite as numerous individually, and consisted of well nigh 
as many genera and si)ecies, as all the mammals of the 

* Some of these dragons of the Secondary ages -were of very consider- 
able size. The wings of a Pterodactyle of the Chalk, in the possession of 
Mr. Bowcrbank, must hare had a spread of about eighteen feet ; those of 
a recently discovered Pterodactyle of the Grccnsand, a spread of not less 
than twenty-seven feet. The Lammcr-gcyer of the Alps has an extent of 
wing of but from ten to eleven feet; while that of the great Condor of the 
Andes, the largest of flying birds, docs not exceed twelve feet. 
10 



]:o 



THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 



present time. In the cretaceous ages, the class, though 
still the dominant one, is visibly reduced in its standing ; it 
had reached its culmmating point in the Oolite, and then 
began to decHne ; and with the first dawn of the Tertiary- 
division we find it occupying, as now, a very subordinate 
place in creation. Curiously enough, it is not until its 
times of humiliation and decay that one of the most 
remarkable of its orders appears, — an order itself illustra- 
tive of extreme degradation, and which figures largely, in 
every scheme of mythology that borrowed through tradi- 
tional channels from Divine revelation, as a meet represent- 
ative of man's great enemy the Evil One. 1 of course 
refer to the ophidian or serpent family. The earliest ophid- 
ian remains kno^vn to the Palaeontologist occur in that 
ancient deposit of the Tertiary di\dsion knoAvn as the Lon- 
don Clay, and mast have belonged to serpents, some of 
them allied to the Pythons, some to the sea-snakes, which, 
judging from the corresponding parts of recent species, 
must have been fi^om fourteen to twenty feet in length. 

Fig. 66. 




PAL^OPIIIS TOLIAPICUS. 

(Ophidian of the Eocene.) 



And here let us again pause for a moment, to remark 
how strangely these irascible, repulsive reptiles, — creatures 
lengthened out far beyond the proportions of the other 
members of their class by mere vegetative repetitions of 
the vertebra?, — condemned to derive, worm-like, their abil- 



HISTORY OF ANIMALS. Ill 

ity of progressive motion fi:om the ring-like scutes of the 
abdomen — venemous in many of their species, — formidable 
in others to even the noblest animals, from their fascinating 
powers and their great craft, — without fore or hinder limbs, 
without thoracic or pelvic arches, — the very tj^^es and ex- 
emplars (our highest naturahsts being the judges) of the 
extreme of animal degradation, — let us, I say, remark how 
strangely their history has been mixed up with that of man 
and of rehgion in all the older m)i;hologies, and in that 
Divine Revelation whence the older mythologies were de- 
rived. It was one of the most ancient of the Phoenician 
fables, that the great antagonist of the gods was a gigantic 
serpent, that had at one time been their subject, but revolted 
against them and became their enemy. It was a monstrous 
serpent that assailed and strove to destroy the mother of 
Apollo ere yet the birth of the god, but which, long after, 
Apollo in turn assaulted and slew. It was a great serpent 
that watched over the apples of the Hesperides, and that 
Hercules, ere he could possess himself of the fruit, had to 
combat and kill. It was a frightful serpent that guarded 
the golden fleece from Jason, and which the hero had to 
destroy in the first instance, and next to exterminate the 
strange brood of armed men that sprang up from its sow^n 
teeth. In short, the old mythologies are well nigh as full 
of the serpent as those ancient Runic obelisks of our coun- 
try, whose endless knots and complicated fretwork are 
formed throughout of the interlacings of snakes. Let us, 
however, accept as representative of this innumerable class 
of legends, the classical story, rendered yet more classical 
by the profound and reverend comment given by Bacon in 
his "Wisdom of the Ancients." "Jupiter and the other 
gods," says the philosopher, in his simple version of the 
tradition, " conferred upon men a most acceptable and de- 
sirable boon, — the gift of perpetual youth. But men, 



112 THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 

foolishly overjoyed hereat, laid this present of the gods upon 
an ass, who, in returning back with it, being extremely 
thirsty, and coming to a fountain, the serpent who was guar- 
dian thereof would not suffer him to drink but upon condi- 
tion of receiving the burden he carried, whatever it should 
be. The silly ass complied ; and thus the perpetual renewal 
of youth was for a sup of water transferred from men to the 
race of serpents." "That this gift of perpetual youth 
should pass from men to serpents," continues Bacon, "seems 
added, by way of ornament and illustration, to the fable." 
And it certainly has much the appearance of an after- 
thought. But how very striking the resemblance borne by 
the story, as a whole, to that narrative in the opening page 
of human history which exhibits the first parents of the race 
as yielding up to the temptation of the serpent the gift of 
immortality; and further, how remarkable the fact, that the 
reptile selected as typical here of the great fallen spirit that 
kept not his first estate, should be at once the reptile of 
latest appearance in creation, and the one selected by phil- 
osophical naturalists as representative of a reversed process 
in the course of being, — of a downward, sinking career, 
from the vertebrate antetype towards greatly lower types 
in the invertebrate divisions! The fallen spirit is repre- 
sented in revelation by what we are now taught to recog- 
nize in science as a degraded reptile. 

Birds make their first appearance in a Ked Sandstone de- 
posit of the United States in the valley of the Connecticut, 
which was at one time supposed to belong to the Triassic 
System, but which is now held to be at least not older than 
the times of the Lias. No fragments of the skeletons of 
birds have yet been discovered in formations older than the 
Chalk : the Connecticut remains are those of footprints ex- 
clusively ; and yet they tell their extraordinary story, so far 
as it extends, with remarkable precision and distinctness. 



HISTORY OF ANIMALS. 



113 



They were apparently all of the Grallae or stilt order of 
birds, — an order to which the cranes, herons, and bustards 

Fig. 67r 




BIED TRACKS OF THE CONNECTICUT. 

{Lias or Oolite.) 



belong, with the ostriches and cassowaries, and which is 
characterized by possessing but three toes on each foot (one 
species of ostrich has but two), or, if a fourth toe be present, 
so imperfectly is it developed in most of the cases, that it 
fails to reach the ground. And in almost all the footprints 
of the primeval birds of the Connecticut there are only 
three toes exhibited. Peculiar, ill understood laws regulate 
the phalangal divisions of the various animals. It is a law 
of the human kind, for instance, that the thumb should 
10* 



114 THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 

consist of but three phalanges ; while the fingers, even the 
smallest, consist .of four. And, in the same way, it is a law 
generally exemplified among birds, that of the three toes 
which correspond to the fingers, the inner toe should be 
composed of three phalanges, the middle or largest toe of 
four phalanges, and the outer toe, though but second in 
point of size, of five phalanges. Such is the law now^ and 
such was equally the law, as shown by the American foot- 
prints, in the times of the Lias. Some of the impressions 

Fig. 68. 




FOSSIL FOOTPRINT. 

Connecticut. 

are of singular distinctness. Every claw and phalange has 
left its mark in the stone ; while the trifid termination of 
the tarso-metatarsal bone leaves three marks more, — fifteen 
in all, — the true ornithic number. In some of the speci- 
mens even the pressure of a metatarsal brush, still possessed 
by some birds, is distinctly traceable; nay, there are in- 
stances in which the impress of the dermoid papillae has 
remained as sharply as if made in wax. But the immense 
size of some of these footprints served to militate for a time 
figainst belief in their ornithic origiQ. The impressions that 



HISTORY OF ANIMALS. 115 

are but secondary in point of size greatly exceed those of 
the hugest birds which now exist ; while those of the largest 
class equal the prints of the bulkier quadrupeds. There are 
tridactyle footprints in the red sandstones of Connecticut 
that measure eighteen inches in length from the heel to the 
middle claw, nearly thirteen inches in breadth from the outer 
to the inner toe, and which indicate, from their distance 
apart in the straight line, a stride of about six feet in the 
creature that impressed them in these ancient sands, — 
measurements that might well startle zoologists who had 
derived their experience of the ornithic class from existing 
birds exclusively. Comparatively recent discoveries have, 
however, if not lessened, at least familiarized us to the won- 
der. In a deposit of New Zealand that dates little if at all 
in advance of the human period, there have been detected 
the remains of birds scarce inferior in size to those of 
America in the Liassic ages. The bones of the Dinornus 
giganteus^ exhibited by the late Dr. Mantell in Edinburgh 
in the autumn of 1850, greatly exceeded in bulk those of 
the largest horse. A thigh bone sixteen inches in length 
measured nearly nine inches in circumference in the middle of 
the shaft : the head of a tibia measured twenty-one inches in 
circumference. It was estimated that a foot entire in all its 
parts, which formed an interesting portion of the exhibition, 
would, when it was furnished with nails, and covered by the 
integuments, have measured about fifteen inches in length ; 
and it was calculated by a very competent authority. Pro- 
fessor Owen, that of the other bones of the leg to which it 
belonged, the tibia must have been about two feet nine 
inches, and the femur about fourteen and a half inches long. 
The larger thigh bone referred to must have belonged, it 
was held, to a bird that stood from eleven to twelve feet 
high, — the extreme height of the great African elephant. 
Such were the monster birds of a comparatively recent 



116 THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 

period ; and their remains serve to render credible the evi- 
dence furnished by the great footprints of their remote 
predecessors of the Lias. The huge feet of the greatest 
Dinornus whose bones have yet been found would have left 
impressions scarcely an inch shorter than those of the still 
huger birds of the Connecticut. Is it not truly wonderful, 
that in this late age of the world, in which the invention of 
the poets seems to content itself with humbler and lowlier 
flights than of old, we should thus find the facts of geology 
fully rivalling, in the strange and the outre^ the wildest fan- 
cies of the romancers who flourished in the middle ages ? 
I have already referred to flying dragons, — real existences 
of the Oolitic period, — that were quite as extraordinary of 
type, if not altogether so huge of bulk, as those with which 
the Seven Champions of Christendom used to do battle ; 
and here are we introduced to birds of the Liassic ages that 
were scarce less gigantic than the roc of Sinbad the Sailor. 
They are fraught with strange meanings these footprints of 
the Connecticut. They tell of a time far removed into the 
by-past eternity, when great birds frequented by myriads 
the shores of a nameless lake, to wade into its shallows in 
quest of mail-covered fishes of the ancient type, or long- 
extinct molluscs ; while reptiles equally gigantic, and of still 
stranger proportions, haunted the neighboring swamps and 
savannahs ; and when the same sun that shone on the tall 
moving forms beside the waters, and threw their long shad- 
ows across the red sands, lighted up the glades of deep 
forests, all of whose fantastic productions, — tree, bush, and 
herb, — have even in their very species long since passed 
away. And of this scene of things only the footprints re- 
main, — "footprints on the sands of time," that tell us, among 
other matters, whence the graceful American poet derived 
his quiet but singularly effective and unmistakeably indige- 
nous figure: — 



HISTORY OF ANIMALS. 117 

" Lives of great men all remind us 

We can make our lives sublime, 
And, departing, leave behind us 

Footprints on the sands of time. 
Footprints that perhaps another. 

Sailing o'er life's solemn main, 
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother. 

Seeing, shall take heart again." 

With the Stonisfield slates, — a clei^osit which lies above 
what is known as the Inferior OoHte, — the remains of 
mammaliferous animals first apj^ear. As, however, no other 
mammalian remains occur until after the close of the great 
Secondary Division, and as certain marked peculiarities 
attach to these Oolitic ones, it may be well to mquire 
whether their place, so far in advance of their fellows, may 
not be indicative of a radical difference of character, — a 
difference considerable enough to suggest to the zoologist 
an improvement in his scheme of classification. It has been 
shown by Professor Owen, — our highest authority in com- 
parative anatomy, — that while one Stonisfield genus une- 
quivocally belonged to the marsupial order, another of Its 

Fig. 69. 




THYLACOTHERIUM PREVOSTI. 

{Stonisfield Slate.) 

genera bears also certain of the marsupial traits ; and ihat 
the group which they composed, — a very small one, and 
consisting exclusively of minute insect-eating animals, — ex- 
hibits in its general aspect the characteristics of this pouched 
family. Even the genus of the group that least resembles 
them was pronounced by Cuvier to have its nearest aflSnities 



118 THE PALiEONTOLOGICAL 

with the opnssums. And let us mark how very much may 
be implied in this circumstance. In the ^^ Animal King- 
dom " of the great naturalist just named, the marsupiata, 
or pouched animals, are made to occupy the fourth place 
among the nine orders of the Mammalia ; but should they 
not rather occupy a place intermediate between the placen- 
tal mammals and the birds ? and does not nature indicate 
their true position by the position which she assigns to 
them in the geologic scale ? The birds are oviparous ; and 
between the extrusion of the egg and the development of 
the perfect young bird they have to hatch it into life during 
a long period of incubation. The marsupiata are not ovip- 
arous, for their eggs want the enveloping shell or skin ; but 
they, too, are extruded in an exceedingly rudimentary and 
foetal state, and have to undergo in the pouch a greatly 
longer period of incubation than that demanded by nature 
for any bird whatever. The young kangaroo is extruded, 
after it has remained for httle more than a month in the 
womb, as a foetus scarcely an inch in length by somewhat 
less than half an inch in breadth : it is blind, exhibiting 
merely dark eye spots ; its limbs are so rudimentary, that 
even the hinder legs, so largely developed in the genus 
when mature, exist as mere stumps ; it is unable even to 
suck, but, holding permanently on by a minute dug, has the 
sustaining fluid occasionally pressed into its mouth by the 
mother. And, undergoing a pecuhar but not the less real 
process of incubation, the creature that had to remain for 
little more than a month in the womb, — strictly thirty-nine 
days, — has to remain in the mother's pouch, ere it is fully 
developed and able to provide for itself, for a period of 
eight months. It is found to increase in weight during this 
hatching process, from somewhat less than an ounce to 
somewhat more than eight pounds. Now, this surely is a 
process quite as nearly akin to the incubation of egg-bear- 



HISTORY OF ANIMALS. 119 

ing birds as to the ordinary nursing process of the placental 
mammals ; and on the occult but apparently real principle, 
that the true arrangement of the animal kingdom is that 
which we find exemplified by the successive introduction of 
its various classes and orders in the course of geologic 
history, should we not anticipate a point of time for the 
introduction of the marsupiata, intermediate between the 
widely-distant pomts at which the egg-bearing birds and 
the true placental mammals appeared? Ranged at once 
chronologically, and by their mode of reproduction, the 
various classes of the vertebrata would run, did we accept 
the suggested reading, as follows : — First appear cold- 
blooded vertebrates (fishes), that propagate by eggs or 
spawn, — chiefly by the latter. Next appear cold-blooded 
vertebrates (reptiles), that propagate by eggs or spawn, — 
chiefly by the former. Then appear warm-blooded verte- 
brates (birds), that propagate by eggs exclusively. Then 
warm-blooded vertebrates come upon the stage, that pro- 
duce eggs without shells, which have to be subjected for 
months to a species of exira-placental incubation. And 
last of all the true placental mammals appear. And thus, 
tried by the test of perfect reproduction, the great verte- 
bral division receives its full development in creation. 

The placental mammals make their appearance, as I have 
said, in the earliest ages of the great Tertiary division, and 
exhibit in the group an aspect very unlike that which they 
at present bear. The Eocene ages were peculiarly the 
ages of the Palseotheres, — strange animals of that pachy- 
dermatous or thick-skinned order to which the elephants, 
the tapirs, the hogs, and the horses belong. It had been 
remarked by naturalists, that there are fewer families of 
this order in living nature than of almost any other, and 
that, of the existing genera, not a few are widely separated 
in their analogies from the others. But in the Palaeotheres 



120 THE PAL.^ONTOLOGICAL 

of the Eocene, wliich ranged in size from a large horse to a 
hare, not a few of the missing hnks have been found, — 
hnks connecting the tapirs to the hogs, and the hogs to the 
Palaeotheres proper ; and there is at least one species sng- 



Fig. 70. 




ANOPLOTHERIUM COMMUNE. 

(Eocene.) 

gestive of an union of some of the more peculiar traits of 
the tapirs and the horses. It was among these extinct 
Pachydermata of the Paris basin that Cuvier effected his 
wonderful restorations, and produced those figures in out- 
line which are now as famiUar to the geologist as any of 
the forms of the existing animals. The London Clay and 
the Eocene of the Isle of Wight have also yielded numer- 
ous specimens of those pachyderms, whose identity with 
the Continental ones has been established by Owen; but 
they are more fragmentary, and their state of keeping 
less perfect, than those furnished by the gypsum quarries of 
Velay and Montmartre. In these the smaller animals occur 
often in a state of preservation so peculiar and partial as to 
excite the curiosity of even the untaught worlanen. Only 
half the skeleton is present. The limbs and ribs of the under 
side are found lying in nearly their proper places ; while of 
the limbs and ribs of the uj^per side usually not a trace can 
be detected, — even the upper side of the skull is often 



HISTORY OF ANIMALS. 



121 



awanting. It would almost seem as if some pre- Adamite 
butcher had divided the carcasses longitudinally, and carried 
away with him all the upper halves. The reading of the 
enigma seems to be, that when the creatures lay down and 



Fig 71. 




ANIMALS OF THE PARIS BASIN,* 

( Eocene. ) 



died, the gypsum in which their remains occur was soft 
enough to permit their under sides to sink into it, and that 
then gradually hardemng, it kept the bones in their places ; 
while the uncovered upper sides, exposed to the disinte- 
grating influences, either mouldered away piecemeal, or 
were removed by accident. The bones of the larger ani- 
mals of the basin are usually found detached ; and ere they 
could be reconstructed into perfect skeletons, they taxed 
the extraordinary powers of the greatest of comparative 
apj^*«mists. Rather more than twenty different species of 

*a.Palseotheritimraagnum. 6, Palaeotherium minus, c, Anoplotheriura 
copimune. 

11 



122 



THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 



extinct mammals have been detected in the Paris basin, — 
not a great number, it may be thought; and yet for so 
limited a locality we may deem it not a very small one, 
when we take into account the fact that all our native 
mammals of Britain and Ireland amount (according to 
Flemiug), if we except the Cetaceae and the seals, to but 
forty species. 

In the Middle or Miocene Tertiary, pachyderms, though 
of a wholly different type from their predecessors, are still 
the prevailing forms. The Dinotherium, one of the greatest 
quadrupedal mammals that ever lived, seems to have formed 
a connecting link in this middle age between the Pachyder- 
mata and the Cetaceae. Each I'amus of the under jaw, 
which in the larger specimens are fully four feet in length, 
bore at the symphysis a great bent tusk turned downwards, 
which appears to have been employed as a pickaxe in uproot- 
ing the aquatic plants and liliaceous roots on which the crea- 
ture seems to have lived. The head, which measured about 

Fig. 72. 




DINOTHERIUM GIGANTEUM. 

{Miocene.) 



three feet across, — a breadth, sufficient, surely, to satisfy the 
demands of the most exacting phrenologist, — was provided 
with muscles of enormous strength, arranged so as to gh^e / 
potent effect to the operations of this strange tool. The 



HISTORY OF ANIMALS. 123 

hinder part of the skull not a little resembled that of the 
Cetaceae ; while, from the form of the nasal bones, the crea- 
ture was evidently furnished wdth a trunk Hke the elephant. 
It seems not improbable, therefore, that this bulkiest of 
mammaliferous quadrupeds constituted, as I have said, a 
sort of uniting tie between creatures still associated in the 
human mind, from the circumstance of their massive propor- 
tions, as the greatest that swim the sea or walk the land, — 
the whale and the elephant. The Mastodon, an elephantoid 
animal, also furnished, like the elephant, with tusks and 
trunk, but marked by certain pecuHarities which constitute 
il a different genus, seems in Europe to have been contem- 
porary with the Dinotherium ; but in North America (the 
scene of its greatest numerical development) it appears to 
belong to a later age. In height it did not surpass the 
African elephant, but it considerably exceeded it in length, 
— a specimen which could not have stood above twelve feet 
high indicating a length of about twenty-five feet : it had 
what the elephants want, — tusks fixed in its lower jaw, 
which the males retained through life, but the females lost 
when young; its hmbs were proj^ortionally shorter, but 
more massive, and its abdomen more elongated and slim ; 
its grinder teeth too, some of which have been known to 
weigh from seventeen to twenty pounds, and their cusps 
elevated into great mammge-like protuberances, to w^hich the 
creature owes its name, and wholly differ in their propor- 
tions and outline from the grinders of the elephant. The 
much greater remoteness of the mastodonic period in Europe 
than in America is a circumstance worthy of notice, as it is 
one of many facts that seem to indicate a general transj^o- 
sition of at least the later geologic ages on the opposite sides 
of the Atlantic. Groups of corresponding character on the 
eastern and western shores of this great ocean were not con- 
temporaneous in time. It has been repeatedly remarked, 



124 . THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 

that the existing plants and trees of the United States, with 
not a few of its fishes and reptiles, bear in their forms and 
construction the marks of a much greater antiquity tlian 
those of Europe. The geologist who sets himself to discover 
similar types on the eastern side of the Atlantic would have 
to seek for them among the deposits of the later Tertiaries. 
North America seems to be still passing through its later 
Tertiary ages ; and it appears to be a consequence of this 
curious transposition, that while in Europe the mastodonic 
period is removed by two great geologic eras from the 
present time, it is removed from it in America by only 
one. Even in America, however, that period lies far beyond 
the reach of human tradition, — a fact borne out by the 
pseudo-traditions retailed by the aborigines regarding the 
mastodon. By none of at least the higher naturalists has 
there been a doubt entertained respecting its herbivorous 
character ; and the discovery of late years of the stomach 
of an individual charged with decayed herbage and frag- 
ments of the succulent branches of trees, some of them of 
existing species, has demonstrated the solidity of the rea- 
sonings founded on its general structure and aspect. The 
pseudo-traditions, however, represent it in every instance as 
a carnivorous tyrant, that, had it not been itself destroyed, 
would have destroyed all the other animals its contempora- 
ries. It is said by the red men of Virginia, " that a troop 
of these tremendous quadrupeds made fearful havoc for 
some time among the deer, the buffaloes, and all the other 
animals created for the use of the Indians, and spread deso- 
lation far and wide. At last ' the Mighty Man above"* seized 
his thunder and killed them all, with the exception of the 
largest of the males, who presenting his head to the thun- 
derbolts, shook them ojQT as they fell ; but, being wounded 
in the side, he betook himself to flight towards the great 
lakes, where ho still resides at the present day." 



HISTORY OF ANIMALS. 125 

Let me here remind you in the passing, that that anti- 
quity of type which characterizes the recent productions of 
North America is one of many wonders, — not absolutely 
geological in themselves, but which, save for the revelations 
of geology, would have forever remained unnoted and un- 
known, — which have been pressed, during the last half cen- 
tury, on the notice of naturalists. " It is a circumstance 
quite extraordinary and unexpected," says Agassiz, in his 
profoundly interesting work on Lake Superior, " that the 
fossil plants of the Tertiary beds of Oeningen resemble 
more closely the trees and shrubs which grow at present in 
the eastern parts of North America, than those of any other 
parts of the world ; thus allowing us to express correctly 
the difference between the opposite coasts of Europe and 
America, by saying that the present eastern American flora, 
and, I may add, the fauna also, have a more ancient charac- 
ter than those of Europe. The plants, especially the trees 
and shrubs, growing in our days in the United States, are, 
as it were, old-fashioned; and the characteristic genera 
Lagomys, Chelydra, and the large Salamanders with per- 
manent gills, that remind us of the fossils of Oeningen, are 
at least equally so ; — they bear the marks of former ages." 
How strange a fact ! Not only are we accustomed to speak 
of the eastern continents as the Old World, in contradistinc- 
tion to the great continent of the west, but to speak also 
of the world before the Flood as the Old World, in contra- 
distinction to the post-diluvian world which succeeded it. 
And yet equally, if we receive the term in either of its ac- 
ceptations, is America an older world still, — an older world 
than that of the eastern continents, — an older world, in the 
fashion and type of its productions, than the world before 
the Flood. And when the immigrant settler takes axe amid 
the deep backwoods, to lay open for the first time what he 
deems a new country, the great trees that fall before him, — 
11* 



126 THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 

the brushwood that he lops away with a sweep of his tool, — 
the unfamiliar herbs which he tramples under foot, — the 
lazy fish-like reptile that scarce stirs out of his path as he 
descends to the neighboring creek to drink, — the fierce 
alligator-like tortoise, with the large limbs and smUl carpace, 
that he sees watching among the reeds for fish and frogs, 
just as he reaches the water, — and the little hare-like 
rodent, without a tail, that he startles by the way, — all at- 
test, by the antiqueness of the mould in which they are cast, 
how old a country the seemingly new one really is, — a 
country vastly older, in type at least, than that of the ante- 
diluvians and the patriarchs, and only to be compared with 
that which flourished on the eastern side of the Atlantic 
long ere the appearance of man, and the remains of whoso 
perished productions we find locked up in the loess of the 
Rhine, or amid the Hgnites of Nassau. America is em- 
phatically the Old World. If we accept, however, as sound 
the ingenious logic by which Colton labors to show, in not 
inelegant verse, that the Moderns are the true Ancients^ we 
may continue to term it the New World stUl. 

"We that on these late days are thrown 
Must be the oldest Ancients known; 
The earliest Modern earth hath seen 
Was Adam in his apron green. 
He lived when young Creation pealed 
Her morning hymn o'er flood and field, 
Till all her infant offspring came 
To that great christening for a name. 
And he that would the Ancients know. 
Must forward come, not backward go : 
The learned lumber of the shelves 
Shows nothing older than ourselves. 
But who in older times than we 
Shall live? — That infant on the knee,— 
See sights to us were never shown, 
And secrets known to us unknown." 



HISTORY OF ANIMALS. 



127 



The group of mammals which, in Europe, at least, imme- 
diately preceded the human period seems to have been 

Fig. 73. 




ELEPHAS PRIMIGENIUS. 

(Mammoth.) Great British Elephant, 
everywhere a remarkable one ; and nowhere was it more so 



128 



THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 



than in the British islands. Our present mammaliferous 
fauna is rather poor ; but the contents of the later deposits 
show that we must regard it as but a mere fragment of a 
very noble one. Associated with species that still exist in 
the less cultivated parts of the country, such as the badger, 



Ficr. 74. 




TROGONTHERIUM CUVIERI. 

Gigantic Beaver. {Pleistocene.) 

the fox, the wild cat, the roe and the red deer, we find the 
remains of great animals, whose congeners must now be 
sought for in the intertropical regions. Britain, during the 
times of the boulder clay, and for ages previous, had its 

Fig. 75. 




URSUS SPEL^US. 

Cave Bear. {Pleistocene.) 



native elephant, its two species of rhinoceros, its hippopot- 
amus, its hyaBna, its tiger, its three species of bears, its two 



HISTORY OF ANIMALS. 129 

species of beavers, its great elk, and its gigantic deer. Forms 
now found widely apart, and in very different climates, meet 
within the British area. During at least the earlier times of 
the group, the temperature of our island seems to have been 
very much what it is now. As I have already had occasion 
to remark, the British oak flourished on its plains and lower 
slopes, and the birch and Scotch fir on its hUls. And yet 
under these famihar trees the lagomys or tailless hare, a 
form now mainly restricted to Siberia and the wilds of Nor- 
thern America, and the reindeer, an animal whose proper 
habitat at the present time is Lapland, were associated with 
forms that are now only to be found between the tropics, 
such as that of the hippopotamus and rhinoceros. These last, 
however, unequivocally of extinct species, seem to have been 
adapted to live in a temperate climate ; and we know from 
the famous Siberian specimen, that the British elephant, 
with its covering of long hair and closely-felted wool, 
was fitted to sustain the rigors of a very severe one. It 
is surely a strange fact, but not less true than strange, 

Kg. 76. 




HYENA SPEL^A. 

Cave Hyaena. (Pleistocene.) 



that since hill and dale assumed in Britain their present con- 
figuration, and the oak and birch flourished in its woods, 



130 THE PALiEONTOLOGICAL 

there were caves in England haunted for ages by families of 
hyaenas, — that they dragged into their dens with the car- 
casses of long extinct animals those of the still familiar deni- 
zens of om- hill-sides, and feasted, now on the lagomys, and 
now on the common hare, — that they now fastened on the 
beaver or the reindeer, and now upon the roebuck or the 
goat. In one of these caves, such of the bones as projected 
from the stiff soil have been actually worn smooth in a nar- 
row passage where the hyaenas used to come in contact with 
them in passing out and in ; and for several feet in depth the 
floor beneath is composed almost exclusively of gnawed 
fragments, that still exhibit the deeply indented marks of 
formidable teeth. In the famous Kirkdale cave alone, parts 
of the skeletons of from two to three hundred hyaenas have 
"been detected, mixed with portions of the osseous frame- 
work of the cave-tiger, the cave-bear, the ox, the deer, the 
mammoth, and the rhinoceros. That cave must have been 
a den of wild creatures for many ages ere the times of the 
boulder clay, during which period it was shut up from all 
access to the light and air by a drift deposit, and lay covered 
over until again laid open by some workmen little more 
than thirty years ago. Not only were many of the wild 
animals of the country which still exist contemporary for a 
time with its extinct bears, tigers, and elephants, but it 
seems at least highly probable that several of our domes- 
ticated breeds derived their origin from progenitors whose 
remains we find entombed in the bone-caves and other 
deposits of the same age; though of course the changes 
effected by domestication in almost all the tame animals 
renders the question of their identity with the indigenous 
breeds somewhat obscure. Cuvier was, however, unable 
to detect any difference between the skeleton of a fossil 
horse, contemporary with the elephant, and that of our 
domestic breed : a fossil goat of the same age cannot be 



HISTORY OF ANIMALS. 131 

distinguished from the domesticated animal; and one of 
our two fossil oxen {Bos longifrons) does not differ more 
from some of the existing breeds than these have, in the 
course of time, been made, chiefly by artificial means, to 
differ among themselves. But of one of our domestic tribes 
no trace has yet been found in the rocks; like the cod family 
among fishes, or the Rosacese among plants, it seems to have 
preceded man by but a very brief period. And certainly, 
if created specially for his use, though the pride of the 
herald might prevent him from selecting it as in aught typi- 
cal of the human race, it would yet not be easy to instance 
a family of animals that has ministered more extensively to 
his necessities. I refer to the sheep, — that soft and harm- 
less creature, that clothes civilized man everywhere in the 
colder latitudes with its fleece, — that feeds him with its 
flesh, — that gives its bowels to be spun into the catgut with 
which he refits his musical instruments, — whose horns he 
has learned to fashion into a thousand useful trinkets, — and 
whose skin, converted into parchment, served to convey to 
later times the thinking of the first fiiU blow of the human 
intellect across the dreary gulf of the middle ages. 

At length the human period begins. A creature appears 
upon the scene unlike all that had preceded him, and w^hose 
nature it equally is to look back upon the events of the 
past, — among other matters, on that succession of beings 
upon the planet which he inhabits, with which we are this 
evening attempting to deal, — and to anticipate at least one 
succession more, in that still future state in which he him- 
self is again to appear, in happier circumstances than now, 
and in a worthier character. We possess another history 
of the primeval age and subsequent chronology of the 
human family than that which we find inscribed in the 
rocks. And it is well that we do so. From various causes, 
the geologic evidence regarding the period of man's first 



132 THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL 

appearance on earth is singularly obscure. That custom of 
"burying his dead out of his sight," which obtained, we 
know, in the patriarchal times, and was probably in use 
ever since man came first under the law of death, has had 
the effect of mingling his remains with those of creatures 
that were extinct for ages ere he began to be. The cavern, 
once a haunt of carnivorous animals, that in the first simple 
ages of his history had furnished him with a shelter when 
living, became his burying-place when dead ; and thus his 
bones, and his first rude attempts in pottery and weapon- 
making, have been found associated with the remains of 
the cave-hysena and cave-tiger, with the teeth of the 
ancient hippopotamus, and the tusks of the primeval ele- 
phant. The evidence on the point, too, — from the great 
paucity of human remains of a comparatively remote 
period, and from the circumstance that they are rarely seen 
by geologists in the stratum in which they occur, — is usu- 
ally very imperfect in its details. Further, it is an evidence 
obnoxious to suspicion, from the fact -that a keen contro- 
versy has arisen on the subject of man's antiquity, that such 
fragments of man himself or of his works as manifest great 
age have been pressed to serve as weapons in the fray, — 
that, occurring always in superficial and local deposits, their 
true era may be greatly antedated, under the influence of 
prejudice, by men who have no design wilfully to deceive, 
— and that while, respecting the older formations, with 
their abundant organisms, the conclusions of any one geol- 
ogist may be tested by all the others, the geologist who 
once in a lifetime picks up in a stratified sand or clay a 
stone arrow-head or a human bone, finds that the data on 
which he founds his conclusions may be received or rejected 
by his contemporaries, but not re-examined. It may be 
safely stated, however, that that ancient record in which 
man is represented as the lastborn of creation, is opposed 



HISTORY OF ANIMALS. 133 

by no geologic fact; and that if, according to Chalmers, 
" the Mosaic -wT^-itings do not fix the antiquity of the globe," 
they at least do fix — making allowance, of course, for the 
varying estimates of the chronologer — " the antiquity of 
the human species." The great column of being, with its 
base set in the sea, and inscribed, like some old triumphal 
pillar, with many a strange form, — at once hieroglyphic 
and figure, — bears, as the ornately sculptured capital, 
which imparts beauty and finish to the whole, reasoning, 
responsible man. There is surely a very wonderful har- 
mony manifested in the proportions of that nice sequence 
in which the invertebrates- — the fishes, the reptiles, the 
birds, the marsupials, the placental mammals, and, last of 
all, man himself — are so exquisitely arranged. It reminds 
us of the fine figure employed by Dryden in his first Ode 
for St. Cecilia's Day, — a figure which, viewed in the light 
cast on it by the modern science of Palaeontology, stands 
out in bolder relief than that in w^hich it could have ap- 
peared to the poet himself: — 

\ 

" From harmony, from heavenly harmony, \ 

This universal frame began ; j 

From harmony to harmony, - \ 

Through all the compass of the notes it ran, / 

The diapason closing full in man." 

In the limits to which I have restricted myself, I have 
been able to do httle more than simply to chronicle the 
successive eras in which the various classes and divisions of 
the organic kingdom, vegetable and animal, make their 
appearance in creation. I have produced merely a brief 
record of the various bu'ths, in their order, of that great 
family whose father is God. And in pursuing such a plan, 
much, of necessity, must have been omitted. I ought 
perhaps to have told you, that very rarely, if ever, do the 
master forms of a period constitute the prevailing or typical 
12 



13i 



THE PALJEONTOLOGICAL 



organisms of its deposits. Of the three great di^dsions of 
which the geologic scale consists, — Palaeozoic, Secondary, 

Fig. 77. Fig. 78. Fig. 79. 




ASAPHUS CAUDATDS. 



i Silurian.) 



ORTHOCERAS 



SPIRIGERINA RETICULARIS. 



LATERALE. 

(Mountain Limestone.) (Old Red Sandstone.) 



and Tertiary, — the first, or ichthyic period, is marked 
chiefly, not by its great fishes, but by the peculiar character 



Fig. 80. 



Fig. 81. 



Fig, 82. Fig. 83. 



mu 




A. MARGARITATUS. 



BISULCATtrS. 



belem:^'itella belemnites 
mucroa'ata. sulcatds. 



(Lias.) (Lias.) (Chalk.) (Oolite.) 

of its brachipodous and cephalopodous mollusca, and in its 
earlier stages by its three-lobed crustaceae ; the second or 



HISTORY OF ANIMALS. 135 

reptilian period was emphatically the period of the ammo- 
nite and belemnite ; while the third and last, or mammalian 
period, was that of gastropodoiis and conchiferous molluscs, 
impressed, generically at least, by all the featm-es of the 

Fig. 84. Fig. 85. 





MUREX ALVEOLATCS. ASTAETE OMALII. 

(Bed Crag.) 

group which still exists in our seas. Save in a few local 
deposits, fishes do not form the prevailing organisms in the 
formations of the age of fishes ; nor reptiles in the forma- 
tions of the age of reptiles ; nor yet mammals in the for- 
mations of the age of mammals. Nay, it is not improbable 
that the recent or human period may be marked most 
prominently in the future, Avhen it comes to exist simply as 
a geologic system, by a still humbler organism than most 
of these molluscs. On almost all rocky shores a line of 
pale gray may be seen at low water, running for mile after 
mile along the belt that has been laid bare at the bases of 
the cliffs by the fall of the tide. It owes its pale color 
to millions of millions of a small balanus {B. balanoides), 
produced in such amazing abundance in the littoral zone as 
to cover with a rough crust every minute portion of rock 
and every sedentary shell. Other species of the same 
genus {B. crenatus and B. 2)orcatus) occupy the depths of 
the sea beyond ; and their remains, washed ashore by the 
waves, and mingled with those of the littoral species, form 




136 THE PALyEONTOLOGICAL 

often great accumulations of shell sand. I have seen 
among the Hebrides a shell sand accumulated along the 
beach to the depth of many feet, of which fully two thirds 
was composed of the valves and compartments of balanidsa ; 
and a similar sand on the east coast of Scotland, a little to 
the south of St. Andrews, formed in still larger proportions 
of the fragments of a single species, — Ba- 
lanus crenatiis, Noav, this genus, so amaz- 
ingly abundant at the present time in every 
existing sea, and whose accumulated remains 
bid fair to exist as great limestone rocks in 
the future, had no existence in the Palaeozoic 

BALANUS CRA8SUS. ci * t t^ j5 ^ • . i 

or Secondary ages, it first appears m the 
times of the earlier Tertiary, in, however, 
only a single species ; and, becoming gradually of more and 
more importance as a group, it receives its fullest numerical 
development in the present time. And thus the remains of 
a sub-class of animals, low in their standing among the 
articulata, may form one of the most prominent Palceonto- 
logical features of the human period. But enough for the 
})resent of circumstance and detail. 

Such, so far as the geologist has yet been able to read 
the records of his science, has been the course of creation, 
from the first beginnings of vitality upon our planet, until 
the appearance of man. And very wonderful, surely, has 
that course been ! How strange a j^rocession ! Never yet 
on Egyptian obelisk or Assyrian frieze, — where long lines 
of figures seem stalking across the granite, each cliarged 
with symbol and mystery, — have our Layards or Rawlin- 
sons seen aught so extraordinary as that long procession of 
being which, starting out of the blank depths of the by- 
gone eternity, is still defihng across the stage, and of 
which we ourselves form some of the passing figjures. 
VVho shall declare the profound meanings with which these 



TirSTOPtY OF ANIMALS. 137 

geologic hieroglypliics are charged, or indicate tlie ultimate 
goal at which the long procession is destined to arrive? 

The readings already given, the conclusions already de- 
duced, are as various as the hopes and fears, the habits of 
thought, and the cast of intellect, of the several interpi-e- 
ters who have set themselves, — some, alas ! with but little 
preparation and very imperfect knowledge, — to declare in 
their order the details of this marvellous, dream-like vision, 
and, with the dream, "the interpretation thereof." One 
class of interpreters may well remind us of the dim-eyed 
old man, — the genius of unbelief so poetically described 
by Coleridge, — who, sitting in his cold and dreary cave, 
"talked much and vehemently concerning an infinite series 
of causes and effects, which he explained to be a string of 
blmd men, the last of whom caught hold of the skirt of 
the one before him, he of the next, and so on, till they 
were all out of sight, and that they all walked infallibly 
straight, without making one false step, though all were 
alike blind." With these must I class those assertors of 
the development hypothesis who can see in the upward 
progress of being only the operations of an incomprehend- 
ing and incromprehensible law, through which, in the course 
of unreckoned ages, the lower tribes and families have 
risen into the higher, and inferior into superior natures, and 
in vh'tue of which, in short, the animal creation has grown, 
in at least its nobler specimens, altogether unwittingly, 
without thought or care on its own part, and without intel- 
ligence on the part of the operating law, from irrational to 
rational, and risen in the scale from the mere promptings 
of instinct to the highest exercise of reason, — from apes 
and baboons to Bacons and Newtons. The blind lead the 
blind; — the unseeing law operates on the unperceiving 
creatures ; and they go, not together into the ditch, but 
12* 



138 THE PAL/EONTOLOGICAL 

direct onwards, straight as an arrow, and liiglier and 
liigher at "every stop. 

Another class look with profound melancholy on that 
great city of the dead, — the burial-place of all that ever 
lived in the past, — which occupies with its ever-extending 
pavements of gravestones, and its ever-lengthening streets 
of tombs and sepulchres, every region opened up by the 
geologist. They see the onward procession of being as if 
but tipped with life, and nought but inanimate carcasses all 
behind, — dead individuals, dead species, dead genera, d/ead 
creations, — a universe of death ; and ask whether the 
same annihilation which overtook in turn all the races of all 
the past, shall not one day overtake our own race also, and 
a time come when men and their works shall have no exist- 
ence save as stone-pervaded fossils locked up in the rock 
forever ? Nowhere do we find the doubts and fears of this 
class more admirably portrayed than in the works of per- 
haps the most thoughtful and suggestive of living j^oets : — • 

" Are God and Nature then at strife, 

That Nature lends such evil dreams. 
So careful of the type she seems, 

So careless of the single life ? 
* So careful of the type ! ' but no, 

From scarped cliff and quarried stone, 
She cries, ' A thousand types are gone; 

I care for nothing ; all shall go : 

Thou makest thine appeal to me; 
I bring to life, I bring to death ; 
The spirit does but mean the breath. 

I know no more.' And he, — shall he, 

Man, her last work, who seemed so fair. 
Such splendid purpose in his eyes, 
Who rolled the psalm to wintry skies 

And built him fanes of fniitless prayer. 

Who trusted God was love indeed, 
And love creation's final law, 
Though Nature, red in tooth and claw, 



HISTORY OF ANIMALS. 139 

With ravine shrieked against his creed, — 
Who loved, who suffered countless ills, 

Who battled for the true, the just, — 

Be blown about the desert dust. 
Or sealed within the iron hills? 
No more!— a monster then, a dreani, 

A discord. Dragons of the prime. 

That tore each other in their slime. 
Were mellow music matched with him. 
O, life, as futile then as frail, — 

O for thy voice to soothe and bless! 

What hope of answer or redress. 
Behind the vail, behind the vail! " 

The sagacity of the poet liere, — that strange sagacity 
which seems so nearly akin to the prophetic spirit, — sug- 
gests in this noble passage the true reading of the enigma. 
Tlie appearance of man upon the scene of being constitutes 
a new era in creation; the operations of a new instinct 
come into play, — that instinct which anticipates a life after 
the grave, and reposes in implicit faith upon a God alike 
just and good, who is the pledged " reward er of all who dili- 
gently seek Him." And in looking klong the long hne of 
being, — ever rising in the scale from higher to yet higher 
manifestations, or abroad on the lower animals, whom 
instinct never deceives, — can we hold that man, immeas- 
urably higher in his place, and infinitely higher in his hopes 
and aspirations, than all that ever went before him, should 
be, notAvithstanding, the one grand error in creation, — the 
one pamful worker, in the midst of present trouble, for a 
state into which he is never to enter, — the befooled expec- 
tant of a happy future, which he is never to see ? As- 
suredly no. He who keeps faith with all his humbler 
creatures, — who gives to even the bee and the dormouse 
the winter for which they prepare, — will to a certainty not 
break faith with man, — with man, alike the deputed lord of 
the present creation, and the chosen heir of all the future. 



140 THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL HISTORY, ETC. 

We nave been looking abroad on the old geologic burying- 
grounds, and deciphering the strange inscriptions on their 
tombs; but there ai'e other burying-gronnds, and other 
tombs, — solitary church-yards among the hills, where the 
dust of the martyrs lies, and tombs that rise over the ashes 
of the wise and good ; nor are there awanting, on even the 
monuments of the perished races, frequent hieroglyphics, 
and symbols of high meaning, which darkly intimate to us, 
that while their burial-yards contain but the debris of the 
past, we are to regard the others as charged with the sown 
seed of the future. 



LECTURE THIRD. 

THE TWO RECORDS, MOSAIC AND GEOLOGICAL. 

It is now exactly fifty years since a clergyman of the 
Scottish Church, engaged in lecturing at St. Andrews, 
took occasion in enumerating the various earths of the 
chemist, to allude to the science, then in its infancy, that 
specially deals with the rocks and soils which these earths 
compose. " There is a prejudice," he remarked, " against 
the speculations of the geologist, which I am anxious to 
remove. It has been said that they nurture infidel pro- 
pensities. It has been alleged that geology, by referring 
the origin of the globe to a higher antiquity than is 
assigned to it by the writings of Moses, undermines our 
faith in the inspiration of the Bible, and in all the animating 
prospects of the immortality which it unfolds. This is a 
false alarm. The writmgs of Moses do not fix the an- 
tiquity of the gloheP 

The bold lecturer on this occasion, — for it needed no 
small courage in a divine of any Established Church to 
take up, at the beginning of the present century, a 
position so determined on the geologic side, — ; was at 
the time an obscure young man, characterized, in the 
small circle in which he moved, by the ardor of his 
temperament and the breadth and originality of his views ; 
but not yet distinguished in the science or literature of 
his country, and of comparatively little weight in the theo- 
logical field. He was marked, too, by what his soberer 



142 THE TWO RECORDS, 

acquaintance deemed eccentricities of thought and conduct. 
When the opposite view was all but universal, he held and 
taught that free trade would be not only a general benefit 
to the people of this country, but would inflict permanent 
injury on no one class or portion of them ; and further, at 
a time when the streets and lanes of all the great cities of 
the empire were lighted with oil burnt in lamps, he held 
that the time was not distant when a carburetted hydro- 
gen gas would be substituted instead ; and, on getting his 
snug parsonage-house repaired, he actually mtroduced into 
the walls a system of tubes and pipes for the passage into 
its various rooms of the gaseous fluid yet to be employed 
as the illuminating agent. Time and experience have since 
impressed their stamp on these supposed eccentricities, and 
shown them to be the sagacious forecastings of a man who 
saw further and more clearly than his contemporaries ; and 
fame has since blown his name very widely, as one of the 
most comprehensive and enlightened, and, withal, one 
of the most thoroughly earnest and sincere, of modern 
theologians. The bold lecturer of St. Andrews was Dr. 
Thomas Chalmers, — a divine whose writings are now 
known wherever the English language is spoken, and 
whose wonderful eloquence lives in memory as a vanished 
power, which even his extraordinary writings fail ade- 
quately to represent. And in the position which he took 
up at this early period with respect to geology and the 
Divine Record, we have yet another instance of the great 
sagacity of the man, and of his ability of correctly esti- 
mating the prevailing weight of the evidence with which, 
though but partially collected at the time, the geologist 
was preparing to establish the leading propositions of his 
science. Even in this late age, when the scientific stand- 
ing of geology is all but universally recognized, and the 
vast periods of time which it demands fully conceded, 



MOSAIC AND GEOLOGICAL. 143 

neither geologist nor theologian could, in any new scheme 
of reconciliation, shape his first proposition more skilfully 
than it was shaped by Chalmers a full half century ago. 
It has formed since that time the preliminary proposition 
of those ornaments of at once science and the English 
Church, the present venerable Archbishop of Canterbury, 
Dr. Bird Sumner, w^th Doctors Buckland, Conybeare, and 
Professor Sedg\vick; of eminent evangelistic Dissenters 
too, such as the late Dr. Pye Smith, Dr. John Harris, 
Dr. Robert Vaughan, Dr. James Hamilton, and the Rev. 
Mr. Binney, — enlightened and distinguished men, who all 
came early to the conclusion, with the lecturer of St. An- 
drews, that "the writings of Moses do not fix the antiquity 
of the globe." 

In 1814, ten years after the date of the St. Andrews' lec- 
tures. Dr. Chalmers produced his more elaborate scheme of 
reconciliation between the Divine and the Geologic Records, 
in a "Review of Cuvier's Theory of the Earth;" and that 
scheme, perfectly adequate to bring the Mosaic narrative 
into harmony with what was known at the time of geologic 
history, has been very extensively received and adopted. 
It may, indeed, still be regarded as the most popular of the 
various existing schemes. It teaches, and teaches truly, 
that between the first act of creation, which evoked out of 
the previous nothing the matter of the heavens and earth, 
and the first act of the first day's work recorded in Genesis, 
periods of vast duration may have intervened ; but further, 
it insists that the days themselves were but natural days of 
twenty-four hours each ; and that, ere they began, the earth, 
though mayhap in the previous period a fair residence of 
life, had become void and formless, and the sun, moon, and 
stars, though mayhap they had before given Hght, had been, 
at least in relation to our planet, temporarily extinguished. 
In short, while it teaches that the successive creations of 



144 THE TWO RECORDS, 

the geologist may all have found ample room in the period 
preceding that creation to which man belongs, it teaches also 
that the record in Genesis bears reference to but the existing 
creation, and that there lay between it and the preceding 
ones a chaotic period of death and darkness. The scheme 
propounded by the late Dr. Pye Smith, and since adopted 
by several writers, differs from that of Chalmers in but one 
circumstance, though an important one. Dr. Smith held, 
with the great northern divine, that the Mosaic days were 
natural days ; that they were preceded by a chaotic period ; 
and that the work done in them related to but that last of 
the creations to which the human species belongs. Further, 
however, he held in addition, that the chaos of darkness 
and confusion out of which that creation was called was of 
but limited extent, and that outside its area, and during the 
period of its existence, many of our present lands and seas 
may have enjoyed the light of the sun, and been tenanted 
by animals and occupied by plants, the descendants of which 
> still continue to exist. The treatise of Dr. Pye Smith was 
published exactly a quarter of a century posterior to the 
promulgation, through the press, of the argument of Dr. 
Chalmers; and this important addition, — elaborated by its 
author between the years 1837 and 1839, — seems to have 
been made to suit the more advanced state of geological 
science at the time. The scheme of reconciliation perfectly 
adequate in 1814 was found in 1839 to be no longer so ; and 
this mainly through a peculiarity in the order in which 
geological fact has been evolved and accumulated in this 
country, and the great fossiliferous systems studied and 
v^rought out ; to which I must be permitted briefly to 
advert. 

William Smith, the " Father of English Geology," as he 
has been well termed (a humble engineer and mineral sur- 
veyoTj possessed of but the ordinary education of men of 



MOSAIC AND GEOLOGICAL. 145 

his class and profession), was born upon the English Oolite, 
— that system which, among the five prevailing divisions 
of the great Secondary class of rocks, holds exactly the 
middle place. The Triassic system and the Lias lie beneath 
it; the Cretaceous system and the Weald rest above. 
Smith, while yet a child, had his attention attracted by the 
Oolitic fossils ; and it was observed, that while his youthful 
contemporaries had their garnered stores of marbles pur- 
chased at the toy shop, he had collected, instead, a hoard of 
splierical fossil terebratulae, which served the purposes of 
the game equally well. The interest which he took in 
organic remains, and the deposits in which they occur, 
influenced him in the choice of a profession ; and, when sup- 
porting himself in honest independence as a skilful mineral 
surveyor and engineer, he travelled over many thousand 
miles of pountry, taking as his starting point the city of 
Bath, which stands near what is termed the Great Oolite : 
and from that centre he carefully explored the various 
Secondary formations above and below. He ascertained 
that these always occur in a certain determinate order; that 
each contains fossils peculiar to itself; and that they rue 
diagonally across the kingdom in nearly parallel lines from 
north-east to south-west. And, devoting every hour which 
he could snatch from his professional labors to the work, i:ji 
about a quarter of a century, or rather more, he completed 
his great stratigraphical map of England. But, though a« 
truly Herculean achievement, regarded as that of a single 
man unindebted to public support, and uncheered by even 
any very general sympathy in his labors, it was found to b'<? 
chiefly valuable in its tracings of the Secondary deposits, 
and strictly exact in only that Oolitic centre from which his 
labors began. It was remarked at an early period that he 
ought to have restricted his publication to the formations 
which lie between the Chalk and the Red Marl inclusive ; 
13 



146 THE TWO RECORDS, 

or, in other words, to the great Secondary division. Th^ 
Coal Measures had, however, been previously better known, 
from their economic importance, and the niunber of thft 
workings opened among them, than the deposits of any 
other system ; and ere the pubHcation of the map of Smith, 
Cuvier and Brogniart had rendered famous all over th<r 
world the older Tertiary formations of the age of the Lon- 
don Clay. But both ends of the geological scale, compris- 
ing those ancient systems older than the Coal, and repre- 
sentative of periods in which, so far as is yet known, life, 
animal and vegetable, first began upon our planet, and those 
systems of comparatively modern date, representative of 
the periods which immediately preceded the human epoch, 
were equally unknov\^i. The light fell strongly on only that 
middle portion of the series on which the labors of Smith 
had been mainly concentrated. The vast geologic bridge, 
which, like that in the exquisite allegory of Addison, strode 
across a " part of the great tide of eternity," " had a black 
cloud hanging at each end of it." And such was the state 
of geologic science when, m 1814, Dr. Chalmers framed 
his scheme of reconciliation. 

Since that time, however, a light not less strong than the 
one throvvn by Wihiam Smith on the formations of the 
Lias and the Oolite has been cast on both the older and 
the newer fossiliferous systems. Two great gaps still 
remain to be filled up, — that which separates the Palae- 
ozoic from the Secondary division, and that which sepa- 
rates the Secondary from the Tertiary one. But they 
occur at neither end of the geological scale. Mainly 
through the labors of two distinguished geologists, who, 
finding the geologic school of their own country distracted 
by a fierce and fruitless controversy, attached themselves 
to the geologic school of England, and have since received 
the honor of knighthood in acknowledgment of their 



MOSAIC AND GEOLOGICAL. 147 

labors, both ends of the geologic scale have been com- 
pleted. Sh- Roderick Murchison addressed himself to the 
formations older than the Coal, more especially to the 
Upper and Lower Silurian systems, from the Ludlow rocks 
to the Llandeilo flags. The Old Red Sandstone too, a 
system which lies more immediately beneath the Coal, has 
also been explored, and its various deposits, with their 
peculiar organic remains, enmnerated and described. And 
Sir Charles Lyell, setting himself to the other extremity 
of the scale, has wrought out the Tertiary formations, and 
separated them into the four great divisions which they 
are now recognized as formuig. And of these, the very 
names mdicate that certain proportions of their organisms 
stni contmue to exist. It is a great fact, now fully estab- 
hshed in the course of geological discovery, that between 
the plants which in the present time cover the earth, and 
the animals which iohabit it, and the animals and plants 
of the later extinct creations, there occurred no break or 
blank, but that, on the contrary, many of the existing 
organisms were contemporary durmg the morning of their 
being, yvith many of the extinct ones during the evening 
of theirs. We know further, that not a few of the shells 
which now live on our coasts, and several of even the wild 
animals which continue to sur\ive amid our tracts of hill 
and forest, were in existence many ages ere the human age 
began. Instead of dating their beginning only a single 
natural day, or at most two natural days, in advance of 
man, they must have preceded him by many thousands of 
years. In fine, in consequence of that comparatively recent 
extension of geologic fact in the direction of the later sys- 
tems and formations, through which we are led to know 
that the present creation was not cut oif abruptly from the 
preceding one, but that, on the contrary, it dovetailed into it 
at a thousand different points, we are led also to know, that 



148 THE TWO RECORDS, 

any scheme of reconciliation which would separate between 
the recent and the extinct existences by a chaotic gulf of 
death and darkness, is a scheme which no longer meets the 
necessities of the case. Though perfectly adequate forty 
years ago, it has been greatly outgrown by the progress 
of geological discovery, and is, as I have said, adequate no 
longer ; and it becomes a not unimportant matter to deter- 
mine the special scheme that would bring into completest 
harmony the course of creation, as now ascertained by the 
geologist, and that brief but sublime narrative of its prog- 
ress which forms a meet introduction ill Holy Writ to the 
history of the human family. The first question to which 
we must address ourselves in any such inquiry is of course 
a very obvious one, — What are the facts scientifically 
determined which now demand a neio scheme of reconciliar 
tion f 

There runs around the shores of Great Britain and 
Ireland a flat terrace of unequal breadth, backed by an 
escarpment of varied height and character, which is known 
to geologists as the old coast-Une. On this flat terrace 
most of the seaport towns of the empire are built. The 
subsoil which underlies its covering of vegetable mould 
consists usually of stratified sands and gravels, arranged 
after the same fashion as on the neighboring beach, and 
interspersed in the same manner with sea shells. The 
escarpment behind, when formed of materials of no great 
coherency, such as gravel or clay, exists as a sloping, grass- 
covered bank, — at one place running out into promontories 
that encroach upon the terrace beneath, — at another 
receding into picturesque, bay-like recesses ; and where 
composed, as in many localities, of rock of an enduring 
quality, we find it worn, as if by the action of the surf, — 
in some parts relieved into insulated stacks, in others liol- 
»owed into deep caverns, — in short, presenting all the 



MOSAIC AND GEOLOGICAL. 149 

appearance of a precipitous coast-line, subjected to tlie 
action of the waves. Now, no geologist can or does doubt 
that this escarpment was at one time the coast-line of the 
island, — the line against which the waves broke at high 
water in some distant age, when either the sea stood fi-om 
twenty to thirty feet higher along our shores than it does 
now, or the land sat from twenty to tliirty feet lower. 
Nor can the geologist doubt, that along the flat terrace 
beneath, with its stratified beds of sand and gravel, and its 
accumulations of sea shells, the tides must have risen and 
fallen twice every day, as they now rise and fall along the 
beach that at present girdles our country. But, in refer- 
ence to at least human history, the age of the old coast-line 
and terrace must be a very remote one. Though geologi- 
cally recent, it lies far beyond the reach of any written 
record. It has been shown by Mr. Smith of Jordanhill, 
one of our highest authorities on the subject, that the wall 
of Antoninus, erected by the Romans as a protection against 
the Northern Caledonians, was made to terminate at the 
Friths of Forth and Clyde, with relation, not to the level 
of the old coast-line, but to that of the existing one. And 
so we must infer that, ere the year A. D. 140 (the year 
during which, according to our antiquaries, the greater 
part of the wall was erected) the old coast-line had at- 
tained to its present elevation over the sea. Further, 
however, we know from the history of Diodorus the 
Sicilian, that at a period earlier by at least two hundred 
years, St. Michael's Mount, in Cornwall, was connected 
with the mainland at low water, just as it is now, by a flat 
isthmus, across w^hich, upon the falling of the tide, the 
ancient Cornish miners used to carry over their tin in carts. 
Had the relative levels of sea and land been those of the 
old coast-hne at the time, St. Michael's Mount, instead of 
being accessible at low ebb would have been separated 
13* 



150 THE TWO RECORDS, 

from the shore by a strait from three to five fathoms in 
depth. It would not have been then as now, as described 
in the verse of Carew, — 

" Both land and island twice a day." 

But even the incidental notice of Diodorus Siculus 
represents very inadequately the antiquity of the existing 
coast-line. Some of its caves, hollowed in hard rock in the 
line of faults and shifts by the attrition of the surf, are 
more than a hundred feet in depth ; and it must have 
required many centuries to excavate tough trap or rigid 
gneiss to a depth so considerable, by a process so slow. 
And yet, however long the sea may have stood against the 
present coast-line, it must have stood for a considerably 
longer period against the ancient one. The latter presents 
generally marks of greater attrition than the modern line, 
and its wave-hollowed caves are of a depth considerably 
more profound. In determining, on an extensive tract of 
coast, the average profundity of both classes of caverns 
from a considerable number of each, I ascertained that the 
proportional average depth of the modern to the ancient 
is as two to three. For every two centuries, then, during 
which the waves have been scooping out the caves of the 
present coast-line, they must have been engaged for three 
centuries in scooping out those of the old one. But we 
know historically^ that for at least twenty centuries the 
sea has been toiling in these modern caves ; and who shall 
dare affirm that it has not been toiling in them for at least 
ten centuries more ? But if the sea has stood for but even 
two thousand six hundred years against the present coast- 
line (and no geologist would dare fix his estimate lower), 
then must it have stood against the old line, ere it could 
have excavated caves one third deeper, three thousand nine 
Lundred years. And both periods united (six thousand 



MOSAIC AXD GEOLOGICAL. 151 

five hundred years) more than exhaust the Hebrew chro- 
nology. Yfet what a mere beginning of geologic history 
does not the epoch of the old coast-line form ! It is but a 
mere starting point from the recent period. Not a single 
shell seems to have become extinct during the last six 
thousand five hundred years! The shells which lie em- 
bedded in the subsoils beneath the old coast-line are exactly 
those which still live in our seas. 

Above this ancient line of coast we find, at various 
heights, beds of shells of vastly older date than those of 
the low-lying terrace, and many of wliich are no longer to 
be found living around our shores. I spent some time last 
autumn in exploring one of these beds, once a sea bottom, 
but now raised two hundred and thirty feet over the sea, 
in which there occurred great numbers of shells now not 
British, though found in many parts of Britain at heights 
varying from two hundred to nearly fourteen hundred feet 
over the existing sea level. But though no longer British 
shells, they are shells that still continue to live in high 
northern latitudes, as on the shores of Iceland and Spitz- 
bergen ; and the abundance in which they were developed 
on the submerged plains and hill-sides of what are now Eng- 
land and Scotland, during what is termed the Pleistocene 
period, shows of itself what a very protracted period that 
Avas. The prevailing tellina of the bed which I last ex- 
plored, — a bed which occurs in some places six miles 
inland, in others elevated on the top of dizzy crags, — is 
a sub-arctic shell {Tellina proximo)^ of which only dead 
valves are now to be detected on our coasts, but which 
may be found Hving at the North Cape and in Greenland. 
The prevailing astarte, its contemporary, was Astarte 
arctica^ now so rare as a British species, that many of our 
most sedulous collectors have never seen a native specimen, 
but which is comparatively common on the northern shores 



152 THE TWO RECORDS, 

of Iceland, and on the eastern coasts of Norway, within 
the arctic circle. In this elevated Scottish bed of the 
Pleistocene period I laid these boreal shells open to the 

Fig. 87. Fig. 88. 





ASTARTE ARCTICA. TELUNA PHOXIMA. 

light by hundreds, on the spot evidently where the indi- 
viduals had lived and died. Under the severe climatal 
conditions to which (probably from some change in the 
direction of the gulf stream) what is now Northern Eu- 
rope had been brought, this tellina and astarte had in- 
creased and multiplied until they became prevaiUng shells 
of the British area ; and this increase must have been the 
slow work of ages, during which the plains, and not a few 
of the table lands, of the country, were submerged in a 
sub-arctic sea, and Great Britain existed as but a scattered 
archipelago of wintry islands. But in a still earlier period, 
of which there exists unequivocal evidence in the buried 
forests of Happisburgh and Cromer, the country had not 
only its head above water, as now, but seems to have 
possessed even more than its present breadth of surface. 
During this ancient time, — more remote by many cen- 
turies than not only the times of the old coast-line, but 
than even those of the partial submergence of the island, 
-—that northern mammoth lived in great abundance, of 
which the remains have been found by hundreds in Eng^ 



MOSAIC AND GEOLOGICAL. 153 

land alone, together with the northern hippopotamus, and 
at least two northern species of rhinoceros. And though 
they have all ceased to exist, with their wild associates in 
the forests and jungles of the Pleistocene, the cave-hygena, 
the cave-tiger, and the cave-bear, we know that the descen- 
dants of some of their feebler contemporaries, such as the i 
badger, the fox, the wild cat, and the red deer, still live 
amid our hills and brakes. The trees, too, under which 
they roamed, and whose remains we find buried in the 
same deposits as theirs, were of species that still hold their 
place as aboriginal trees of the country, or of at least the 
more northerly provinces of the continent. The common 
Scotch fir, the common birch, and a continental species of 
conifer of the far north, the Norwegian spruce [Abies 

Fig. 89. 




NORWEGIAN SPRUCE. 

(Abies excelsa.) 



J 



excelsa)^ have been found underlying the Pleistocene drift, 
and rooted in the mammiferous crag ; and for many ages 
must the old extinct elephant have roamed amid these 



^ 



154 THE TWO RECORDS, 

familiar trees. From one limited tract of sea bottom on 
the Norfolk coast the fishermen engaged in dredging 
oysters brought ashore, in the course of thirteen years 
(from 1820 to 1833), no fewer than two thousand elephants' 
grinders, besides great tusks and numerous portions of 
skeletons. It was calculated that these remains could not 
have belonged to fewer than five hundred individual mam- 
moths of English growth ; and, various in their states of 
keeping, and belonging to animals of which only a few at 
a time could have found sufl[icient food in a limited tract of 
country, the inference seems inevitable that they must have 
belonged, not to one or two, but to many succeeding gen- 
erations. The further fact, that remains of this ancient 
elephant {Elephas primige7iius) occur all round the globe 
in a broad belt, extending from the fortieth to near the 
seventieth degree of north latitude, leads to the same 
conclusion. It must have required many ages ere an 
animal that breeds so slowly as the elephant could have 
extended itself over an area so vast. 

Many of the contemporaries of this northern mammoth, 
especially of its molluscan contemporaries, continue, as I 
have said, to live in their descendants. Of even a still more 
ancient period, represented by the Red Crag, seventy out of 
every hundred species of shells still exist ; and of an older 
period still, represented by the Coraline Crag, there survive 
sixty out of every hundred. In the Red Crag, for instance, 
we find the first known ancestors of our common edible 
periwinkle and common edible mussel ; and in the Coraline 
Crag, the first known ancestors of the common horse-mussel, 
the common whelk, the common oyster, and the great pec- 
ten. There then occurs a break in the geologic deposits of 
Britain, which, however, in other parts of Europe we find 
so filled up as to render it evident that no corresponding 
break took place in the chain of existence; but that, on tho 



MOSAIC AXD GEOLOGICA,L. 155 

contrary, from the present time up to the times represented 
by the earliest Eocene formations of the Tertiary division, 
day has succeeded day, and season has followed season, and 
that no chasm or hiatus — no age of general chaos, dark- 
ness, and death — has occurred, to break the line of succes- 
sion, or check the course of life. All the evidence runs 
counter to the supposition that immediately before the 
appearance of man upon earth, there existed a chaotic period 
which separated the previous from the present creation. 
Up till the commencement of the Eocene ages, if even then, 
there "was no such chaotic period, in at least what is now 
Britain and the European continent : the persistency from a 
high antiquity of some of the existing races, of not only 
plants and shells, but of even some of the mammiferous 
animals, such as the badger, the goat, and the wild cat, 
prove there was not ; and any scheme of reconciliation 
which takes such a period for granted must be deemed as 
unsuited to the present state of geologic knowledge, as any 
scheme would have been forty years ago which took it for 
granted that the writings of Moses do " fix the antiquity of 
the globe." 

The scheme of reconciliation adopted by the late Dr. Pye 
Smith, though, save in one particular, identical, as I have 
said, with that of Dr. Chalmers, is made, in virtue of its 
single point of difference, to steer clear of the difficulty. 
Both schemes exhibit the creation recorded in Genesis as an 
event which took place about six thousand years ago ; both 
describe it as begun and completed in six natural days; 
/ind both represent it as cut off from a previously existing 
/creation by a chaotic period of death and darkness. But 
while, according to the scheme of Chalmers, both the Bib- 
deal creation and the previous period of death are repre- 
sented as coextensive with the globe, they are represented, 
according to that of Dr. Smith, as limited and local. They 



156 THE TWO RECORDS, 

may have extended, it is said, over only a few provinces of 
Central Asia, in which, when all was life and light in other 
parts of the globe, there reigned for a time only death and 
darkness amid the welterings of a chaotic sea; which, at the 
Divine command, was penetrated by light, and occupied by 
dry land, and ultimately, ere the end of the creative week, 
became a centre in which certain plants and animals, and 
finally man himself, were created. And this scheme, by 
leaving to the geologist in this country and elsewhere, save 
mayhap in some unknown Asiatic district, his unbroken 
series, certainly does not conflict with the facts educed by 
geologic discovery. It virtually removes Scripture alto- 
gether out of the field. I must confess, however, that on 
this, and on some other accounts, it has failed to satisfy me. 
I have stumbled, too, at the conception of a merely local 
and limited chaos, in which the darkness would be so com- 
plete, that when first penetrated by the light, that pene- 
tration could be described as actually a making or creating 
of light ; and that, while life obtained all around its pre- 
cincts, could yet be thoroughly void of life. A local dark- 
ness so profound as to admit no ray of light seems to have 
fallen for a time on Egypt, as one of the ten plagues; but the 
event Avas evidently miraculous ; and no student of natural 
science is entitled to have recourse, in order to extricate 
himself out of a difficulty, to supposititious, unrecorded 
miracle. Creation cannot take place without miracle ; but 
it would be a strange reversal of all our previous conclusions 
on the subject, should we have to hold that the dead, dark, 
'blank out of which creation arose was miraculous also. 
And if, rejecting miracle, we cast ourselves on the purely 
natural, we find that the local darknesses dependent on 
known causes, of which we have any record in history, 
were always either very imperfect, like the darkness of your 
London fogs, or very temporary, like the darkness described 



MOSAIC AND GEOLOGICAL. 157 

by Pliny as occasioned by a cloud of volcanic ashes ; and so, 
altogether inadequate to meet the demands of a hyjDothesis 
such as that of Dr. Smith. And yet further, I am disposed, 
I must add, to look for a broader and more general meaning 
in that grand description of the creation of all tilings with 
which the Divine record so appropriately opens, than I could 
recognize it as forming, were I assured it referred to but 
one of many existing creations, — a creation restricted to 
mayhap a few hundred square miles of country, and to may- 
hap a few scores of animals and plants. "What, then, is the 
scheme of reconciliation which I would venture to pro- 
pound ? 

Let me first remark, in reply, that I come before you this 
evening, not as a philologist, but simply as a student of 
geological fact, who, believing his Bible, believes also,, that 
though theologians have at various times striven hard to 
pledge it to false science, geographical, astronomical, and 
geological, it has been pledged by its Divine Author to no 
falsehood whatever. I occupy exactly the position now, 
with respect to geology, that the mere Christian geographer 
would have occupied with respect to geography in the days 
of those doctors of Salamanca who deemed it unscriptural 
to hold with Columbus that the world is round, — not flat ; 
or exactly the position which the mere Christian astronomer 
would have occupied with respect to astronomy in the days 
of that Francis Turrettine who deemed it unscriptural to 
hold with Newton and Galileo, that it is the earth which 
moves in the heavens, and the sun which stands still. The 
mere geographer or astronomer might have been wholly 
unable to discuss with Turrettine or the doctors the niceties 
of Chaldaic punctuation, or the various meanings of the 
Hebrew verbs. But this much, notwithstanding, he would 
be perfectly qualified to say : — However great your skill as 
linguists, your readhig of what you term the scriptural 
U 



158 THE TWO RECORDS, 

geography or scriptural astronomy must of necessity be a 
false reading, seeing that it commits Scripture to what, in 
my character as a geographer or astronomer, I know to be 
a monstrously false geography or astronomy. Premising, 
then, that I make no pretensions to even the slightest skill 
in philology, I remark further, that it has been held by 
accomplished philologists, that the days of the Mosaic 
creation may be regarded, without doing violence to the 
genius of the Hebrew language, as successive periods of 
great extent. And certainly, in looking at my English 
Bible, I find that the portion of tune spoken of in the first 
chapter of Genesis as six days, is spoken of in the second 
chapter as one day. True, there are other philologers, such 
as the late Professor Moses Stuart, who take a different 
view ; but then I find this same Professor Stuart stiiving 
hard to make the phraseology of Moses " fix the antiquity 
of the globe;" and so, as a mere geologist, I reject his 
philology, on exactly the same principle on which the mere 
geographer would reject, and be justified in rejecting, the 
philology of the doctors of Salamanca, or on which the mere 
astronomer would reject, and be justified in rejecting, the 
philology of Turrettine and the old Franciscans. I would, 
in any such case, at once, and without hesitation, cut the 
philological knot, by determining that that philology cannot 
be sound which would commit the Scriptures to a science 
that cannot be true. Waiving, however, the question as a 
philological one, and simply holding with Cuvier, Parkinson, 
and SilUman, that each of the six days of the Mosaic nar- 
rative in the first chapter were what is assuredly meant by 
t'le day referred to in the second, — not natural days, but 
lengthened periods, — I find myself called on, as a geologist, 
to account for but three of the six. Of the period during 
which light was created, — of the period during which a 
firmament was iiuide to separate the waters from the waters, 



MOSAIC AND GEOLOGICAL. 159 

— or of tlio period during which the two great lights of the 
earth, with the other heavenly bodies, became visible from 
the earth's surface, — we need expect to find no record in 
the rocks. Let me, however, pause for a moment, to re- 
mark the peculiar character of the language in which we 
are first introduced in the Mosaic narrative to the heavenly 
bodies, — sun, moon, and stars. The moon, though abso- 
lutely one of the smallest lights of our system, is described 
as secondary and subordinate to only its greatest light, the 
sun. It is the apparent, then, not the actual, which we find 
in the passage, — what seemed to be, not what V3as; and as 
it was merely what appeared to be greatest that was de- 
scribed as greatest, on what grounds are we to hold that it 
may not also have been what ajypeared at the time to be 
made that has been described as made ? The sun, moon, 
and stars may have been created long before, though it was 
not until this fourth period of creation that they became 
visible from the earth's surface. 

The geologist, in his attempts to collate the Divine with 
the geologic record, has, I repeat, only three of the six 
periods of creation to account for, — the period of plants, 
the period of great sea monsters and creeping things, and 
the period of cattle and beasts of the earth. He is called 
on to question his systems and formations regarding the 
remains of these three great periods, and of these only. 
And the question once fairly stated, w^hat, I ask, is the 
reply ? All geologists agree in holding that the vast geo- 
logical scale naturally divides into three great parts. There 
are many lesser divisions, — divisions into systems, forma- 
tions, deposits, beds, strata; but the master divisions, in 
each of which we find a type of life so unlike that of the 
others, that even the unpractised eye can detect the difier- 
ence, are simply three, — the Palaeozoic, or oldest fossil- 



ICO THE TWO RECORDS, 

iferous division ; the Secondary, or middle fossiliferous di- 
vision ; and the Tertiary, or latest fossiliferous division. 

In the first, or Palaeozoic division, we find corals, crus- 
taceans, molluscs, fishes, and, in its later formations, a few 
reptiles. But none of these classes of organisms give its 
leading character to the Palaeozoic ; they do not constitute 
its prominent feature, or render it more remarkable as a 
scene of life than any of the divisions which followed. 
That which chiefly distinguished the Palaeozoic from the 
Secondary and Tertiary periods was its gorgeous flora. It 
was emphatically the period of plants, — " of herbs yield- 
ing seed after their kind." In no other age did the world 
ever witness such a flora: the youth of the earth was 
peculiarly a green and umbrageous youth, — a youth of 
dusk and tangled forests, of huge pines and stately arau- 
carians, of the reed-like calamite, the tall tree-fern, the sculp- 
tured sigillaria, and the hirsute lepidodendron. Wherever 
dry land, or shallow lake, or running stream appeared, from 
where Melville Island now sj^reads out its ice wastes under 
the star of the pole, to where the arid plains of Australia 
lie solitary beneath the bright cross of the south, a rank 
and luxuriant herbage cumbered every footbreadth of the 
dank and steaming soil; and even to distant planets our 
earth must have shone through the envelojiing cloud with 
a green and dehcate ray. Of this extraordinary age of 
plants we have our cheerful remembrancers and witnesses 
in the flames that roar in our chimneys when we pile up 
the winter fire, — in the brilliant gas that now casts its 
light on this great assemblage, and that lightens up the 
streets and lanes of this vast city, — in the glowing fur- 
naces that smelt our metals, and give moving power to our 
ponderous engines, — in the long dusky trains that, with 
shriek and snort, speed dart-like athwart our landscapes, — 
and in the great cloud-enveloped vessels that darken the 



MOSAIC AXD Gro LOGICAL. IGl 

lower reaches of your noble river, and rush in foam OAcr 
ocean and sea. The geologic evidence is so complete as to 
be patent to all, that the first great period of organized 
being was, as described in the Mosaic record, peculiarly 
a period of herbs and trees, "yielding seed after their 
kind." i 

The middle great period of the geologist — that of the 
Secondary division — possessed, like the earlier one, it? 
herbs and plants, but they were of a greatly less luxuriant 
and conspicuous character than their predecessors, and no 
longer formed the prominent trait or feature of the creation 
to which they belonged. The period had also its corals, 
its crustaceans, its molluscs, its fishes, and in some one 
or two exceptional instances its dwarf mammals. But the 
grand existences of the age, — the existences in which it 
excelled every other creation, earlier or later, were its 
huge creej)ing things, — its enormous monsters of the 
deep, — and, as shown by the impressions of their foot- 
prints stamped upon the rocks, its gigantic birds. It was 
peculiarly the age of egg-bearing animals, winged and 
wingless. Its w^onderful tchales^ not, however, as now, of 
the mammalian, but of the reptilian class, — ichthyosaurs, 
plesiosaurs, and cetiosaurs, — must have tempested the 
deep ; its creeping lizards and crocodiles, such as the 
teliosaurus, megalosaurus, and iguanodon, — creatures some 
of w^hich more than rivalled the existing elephant in 
height, and greatly more than rivalled him in bulk, — 
must have crowded the plains or haunted by myriads the 
rivers of the period ; and we know that the footprints of 
at least one of its many birds are fully twice the size of 
those made by the horse or camel. We are thus prepared 
to demonstrate, that the second period of the geologist 
was peculiarly and characteristically a period of whale-like 
reptiles of the sea, of enormous creeping reptiles of the 
14* 



1G2 THE TWO RECORDS, 

land, and of numerous birds, some of them of gigantic 
size ; and, in meet accordance with the fact, we find that 
the second Mosaic period with which the geologist is called 
on to deal was a period in which God created the foA\l 
that flieth above the earth, with moving [or creeping] 
creatures, both in the waters and on the land, and what 
our translation renders great whales, but that I find ren- 
dered, in the margin, great sea monsters. 

The Tertiary period had also its prominent class of exist- 
ences. Its flora seems to have been no more conspicuous 
than that of the present time ; its reptiles occupy a very 
subordinate place ; but its beasts of the field were by far 
the most wonderfully developed, both in size and numbers, 
that ever appeared upon earth. Its mammoths and its 
mastodons, its rhinoceri and its hippopotami, its enormous 
dinotherium and colossal megatherium, greatly more than 
equalled in bulk the largest mammals of the present time, 
and vastly exceeded them in number. The remains of one 
of its elephants (Elepha£ primigenius) are still so abun- 
dant amid the frozen wastes of Siberia, that what have 
been not inappropriately termed "ivory quarries" have 
been wrought among their bones for more than a hundred 
years. Even in our own country, of which, as I have 
already shown, this elephant was for long ages a native, so 
abundant are the skeletons and tusks, that there is scarcely 
a local museum in the kingdom that has not its specimens, 
dug out of the Pleistocene deposits of the neighborhood. 
And with this ancient elephant there were meetly associ- 
ated in Britain, as on the northern continents generally all 
around the globe, many other mammals of corresponding 
magnitude. " Grand indeed," says an English naturalist, 
" was the fauna of the British islands in those early days. 
Tigers as large again as the biggest Asiatic species lurhcd 
in the ancient thickets ; elephants of nearly t\\'ice the bulk 



MOSAIC AND GEOLOGICAL. 1G3 

of the largest individuals that now exist in Africa or Ceylon 
roamed in herds ; at least two species of rhinoceros forced 
their way through the primeval forest ; and the lakes and 
rivers were tenanted by hippopotami as bulky, and with as 
great tusks, as those of Africa." The massive cave-bear 
and large cave-hygena belonged to the same formidable 
group, with at least two species of great oxen {Bos longi- 
fwns and JBos primigenius), with a horse of smaller size, 
and an elk (Megaceros Sibernicus) that stood ten feet 
four inches in height. Truly this Tertiary age — this third 
and last of the great geologic periods — was peculiarly the 
age of great " beasts of the earth after their kind, and of 
cattle after their kind." 

Permit me at this stage, in addressing myself to a Lon- 
don audience, to refer to what has been well termed one 
of the great sights of London. An illustration drawn from 
what must be familiar to you all may impart to your con- 
ceptions, respecting the facts on which I build, a degree of 
tangibility which otherwise they could not possess. 

One of perhaps the most deeply interesting departments 
of your great British Museum — the wonder of the world 
— is that noble gallery, consisting of a suite of rooms, 
opening in line, the one beyond the other, which forms 
its rich storehouse of organic remains. You must of 
course remember the order in which the organisms of 
that gallery are ranged. The visitor is first ushered into a 
spacious room devoted to fossil plants, chiefly of the Coal 
Measures. And if these organisms are in any degree less 
imposing in their aspect than those of the apartments 
which follow in the series, it is only because that, from 
the exceeding greatness of the Coal Measure plants, they 
can be exhibited in but bits and fragments. Within less 
than an hour's walk of the Scottish capital there are single 
trees of this ancient period deeply embedded in the sand- 



164 THE TWO RECORDS, 

stone strata, which, though existing- as mere mutilated 
portions of theii* former selves, would yet fail to find 

Fig, 90. 




LEPIDODENDRON STERNBERGII. 



accommodation in that great apartment. One of tliose 
fossil trees, — a noble araucarian, — which occurs in what 



MOSAIC AND GEOLOGICAL. 



165 



is knowTi as the Granton quarry, is a mere fragment, for it 
wants both root and top, and yet what remains is sixty-one 

Fig. 9L 





CALAMITES CANN^FORMIS. 



feet in length by six feet in diameter ; and beside it there 
lies a smaller araucarian, also mutilated, for it wants top 



166 THE TWO RECORDS, 

and branches, and it measures seventy feet in length by four 
feet in diameter. I saw lately, in a quarry of the Coal Meas- 
ures about two miles from my dwelling-house, near Edin- 
burgh, the stem of a plant {Lepidodendron Sternhergii)^ 
allied to the dwarfish club mosses of our moors, consid- 
erably thicker than the body of a man, and which, reckon- 
ing on the ordinary proportions of the plant, must have 
been at least seventy feet in height. And of a kind of 
aquatic reed (calamites), that more resembles the diminu- 
tive mare's tail of our marshes than aught else that now 
lives, remains have been found in abundance in the same 
coal field, more than a foot in diameter by thirty feet in 
length. Imposing, then, as are the vegetable remains of 
this portion of the iN'ational Museum, they would be 
greatly more imposing still did they more adequately 
represent the gigantic flora of the remote age to which 
they belong. 

Passing onwards in the gallery from the great plants of 
the Palaeozoic division to the animals of the Secondary one, 
the attention is at once arrested by the monstrous forms on 
the wall. Shapes that more than rival in strangeness the 
great dragons, and griffins, and "laithly worms," of me- 
diaeval legend, or, according to Milton, the "gorgons, 
hydras, and chimeras dire," of classical fable, frown on the 
passing visitor ; and, though wrapped up in their dead and 
stony sleep of ages, seem not only the most strange, but 
also the most terrible things on which his eye ever rested. 
Enormous jaws, bristling with pointed teeth, gape horrid in 
the stone, under staring eye-sockets a full foot in diameter. 
Necks that half equal in length the entire body of the boa- 
constrictor stretch out from bodies mounted on fins like 
those of a fish, and ftirnished with tails somewhat resem- 
bling those of the mammals. Here we see a winged 
dragon, that, armed with sharp teeth and strong claws, 



MOSAIC AND GEOLOGICAL. 



167 



hixd careered through the air on leathern wings Uke those 
of a bat; there an enormous crocodiUan whale, that, 
mounted on many-jointed paddles, had traversed, in quest 
of prey, the green depths of the sea ; yonder a herbivor- 
ous lizard, with a horn like that of the rhinoceros projecting 
from its snout, and that, when it browsed amid the dank 
meadows of the Wealden, must have siood about twelve 
feet high. All is enormous, monstrous, vast, amid the 
creeping and flying things and the great sea monsters of 
this division of the gallery. 

We pass on into the third and lower division, and an 
entirely different class of existences now catch the eye. 
The huge mastodon, with his enormous length of body, and 

Fig. 92 




MEGATHERIUM CUVIERI. 



his tusks projecting from both upper and under jaw, stands 
erect in the middle of the floor; — a giant skeleton. We 
see beside him the great bones of the megatherium, — thigh 
bones eleven inches in diameter, and claw-armed toes more 
than two feet in length. There, too, ranged species beyond 
species, are the extinct elephants ; and there the ponderous 
skull of the diuotherium, with the bent tusks in its lower 



168 THE TWO RECOllDS, 

jaw, that give to it the appearance of a great pickaxe, and that 
must liave dug deeply of old amid the liliaceous roots and 
bulbs of the Tertiary lakes and rivers. There also are the 




SKULL OF DINOTHERIUM GIGANTEUM. 

{Miocene.) 

massive heads and spreading horn-cores of the JBos primi- 
genhis^ and the large bones and broad plank-like horns of 
the great Irish elk. And there too, in the same apartment, 
but leaning against its further wall, — last, as most recent, 
of all the objects of wonder in that great gallery, — is the 
famous human skeleton of Guadaloupe, standing out in bold 
relief from its slab of gray limestone. It occurs in the 
series, just as the series closes, a little beyond the mastodon 
and the mammoths ; and, in its strange character as a fossil 
man, attracts the attention scarce less powerfully than the 
great Palaeozoic plants, the great Secondary reptiles, or the 
great Tertiary mammals. 

I last passed through this wondrous gallery at the time 
when the attraction of the Great Exhibition had filled Lon- 
don A\'ith curious visitors from all parts of the empire ; and 
a group of intelligent mechanics, fresh from some manufac- 
turing town of the midland counties, were sauntering on 



MOSAIC AND GEOLOGICAL. IG^ 

through its chambers immediately before me. They stood 
amazed beneath the dragons of the OoHte and Lias ; and, 
with more than the admiration and wonder of the discij^les 
of old when contemplating the huge stones of the Temple, 
they turned to say, in almost the old words, " Lo ! master, 
what manner of great beasts are these ? " " These are," I 
replied, " the sea monsters and creej^ing things of the second 
great period of organic existence." The reply seemed satis- 
factory, and we passed on together to the terminal apart- 
ments of the range appropriated to the Tertiary organisms. 
And there, before the enormous mammals, the mechanics 
again stood in wonder, and turned to inquire. Anticipating 
the query, I said, "And these are the huge beasts of the 
earth, and the cattle of the third great period of organic 
existence ; and yonder, in the same apartment, you see, but 
at its further end, is the famous fossil man of Guadaloupe, 
i'ocked up by the petrifactive agencies in a slab of lime- 
stone." The mechanics again seemed satisfied. And, of 
course, had I encoimtered them in the first chamber of the 
suite, and had they questioned me respecting the organisms 
with which it is occupied, I would have told them that they 
were the remains of the herbs and trees of the first great 
period of organic existence. But in the chamber of the 
mammals we parted, and I saw them no more. 

There could not be a simpler incident. And yet, rightly 
apprehended, it reads its lesson. You have all visited the 
scene of it, and must all have been struck by the three 
salient points, if I may so speak, by which that noble gallery 
lays strongest hold of the memory, and most powerfully 
impresses the imagination, — by its gigantic plants of the 
first period (imperfectly as these are represented in the col- 
lection), by its strange misproportioned sea monsters and 
creeping things of the second, and by its huge mammals of 
the third. Amid many thousand various objects, and a per- 
15 



170 THE TWO RECORDS, 

plexing multi2:)licity of detail, which it would require the 
patient study of years even partially to classify and know, 
these are the great ]3roniinent features of the gallery, that 
involuntarily, on the part of the visitor, force themselves on 
his attention. They at once pressed themselves on the 
attention of the intelligent though unscientific mechanics, 
and, I doubt not, still dwell vividly in their recollections ; 
and I now ask you, when you again visit the national 
museum, and verify the fact of the great prominence of 
these classes of objects, to bear in mmd, that the gallery in 
which they occur represents, both in the order and char- 
acter of its contents, the course of creation. I ask you to 
remember that, had there been human eyes on earth during 
the Palaeozoic, Secondary, and Tertiary j)eriods, they would 
have been filled in succession by the great plants, the great 
reptiles, and the great mammals, just as those of the 
mechanics were filled by them in the museum. As the sun 
and moon, when they first became visible in the heavens, 
would have seemed to human eyes — had there been human 
eyes to see — not only the greatest of the celestial lights, 
but peculiarly the prominent objects of the epoch in which 
they appeared, so would these plants, reptiles, and mam- 
mals, have seemed in succession the prominent objects of the 
several epochs in which they appeared. And, asking the 
geologist to say whether my replies to the mechanics were 
not, with all their simplicity, true to geological fact, and 
the theologian to say whether the statements which they 
embodied were not, with all their geology, true to the scri}> 
tural narrative, I ask further, whether (of course, making 
due allowance for the laxity of the terms botanic and zoo- 
logical of a primitive language unadapted to the niceties of 
botanic or zoologic science) the Mosaic account of creation 
could be rendered more essentially true, than we actually 
find it, to the history of creation geologically ascertained. 



MOSAIC AND GEOLOGICAL. 171 

If, taking the Mosaic days as equivalent to lengthened 
periods, we hold that, in giving their brief history, the 
inspired writer seized on but those salient points that, like 
the two great lights of the day and night, would have 
aiTCsted most powerfully, during these periods, a human 
eye, we shall find the harmony of the two records complete. 
In your visit to the museum, I would yet further ask you to 
mark the place of the human skeleton in the great gallery. 
It stands — at least it stood only a few years ago — in the 
same apartment with the huge mammifers. And it is surely 
worthy of remark, that while in both the sacred and geo- 
logic records a strongly defined line separates between the 
period of plants and the succeeding periods of reptiles, and 
again between the period of reptiles and the succeeding 
period of mammals, no line in either record separates 
between this period of mammals and the human period. 
Man came into being as the lastborn of creation, just ere 
the close of that sixth day — the third and terminal period 
of organic creation — to Avhich the great mammals belong. 
Let me yet further remark, that in each of these three 
great periods Ave find, with respect to the classes of exist- 
ences, vegetable or animal, by which they were most promi- 
nently characterized, certain well marked culminating points 
together, if I may so express myself, — twiUght periods of 
morning dawn and evening decline. The plants of the 
earlier and terminal systems of the Palaeozoic division are 
few and small : it was only during the protracted eo7is of 
the Carboniferous period that they received their amazing 
development, unequalled in any previous or succeeding time.* 

* It will be seen that there is no attempt made in this lecture to represent 
the great Palaeozoic division as characterized throughout its entire extent by 
a luxuriant flora. It is, on the contrary, expressly stated here, that the 
*' plants of its earlier and terminal formations (i. e. those of the Silurian, 
Old Red, and Permian Systems) were few and small," and that " it was 



172 THE TWO RECORDS, 

In like manner, in the earlier or Triassic deposits of tlie 
Secondary division, the reptilian remains are comparatively 
inconsiderable ; and they are almost equally so in its Cre- 
taceous or later deposits. It was during those middle ages 

only during the protracted cons of the carboniferous period that they received 
their amazing development, unequalled in any previous or succeeding time." 
Being thus express in my limitation, I think I have just cause of compkiint 
against any one who represents me as unfairly laboring, in this very com- 
position, to make it be believed that the whole Palseozoic period was 
characterized by a gorgeous flora; and as thus sophistically generalizing 
in the first instance, in order to make a fallacious use of the generalization 
in the second, with the intention of misleading non-geologic readers. Such, 
however, as may be seen from the following extracts from the " Proceed- 
ings of the Academy of Natural Science at Philadelphia," is the charge 
preferred against me by a citizen of the United States. 

" Mr. William Parker Foulke asked the attention of the Society to a lec- 
ture by Mr. Hugh Miller, recently republished in the United States under 
the title of ' The Two Records, Mosaic and Geological,' and made some 
remarks upon the importance of maintaining a careful scrutiny of the 

logic of the natural sciences Mr. Miller teaches that, in the 

attempt to reconcile the two ' records,' there are only three periods to be 
accounted for by the geologist, viz. ' the pei'iod of plants ; the period of 
great sea monsters and creeping things ; and the period of cattle and beasts of 
the earth;' and that the first of these periods is represented by the rocks 
grouped under the term Palceozoic, and is distinguished from the Second- 
ary and Tertiary chiefly by its gorgeous flora; and that the geological 
evidence is so complete as to be patent to all, that the first great period of 
organized being was, as described in the Mosaic record, peculiarly a period 
of herbs and trees, yielding seed after their kind. The general reader, not 
familiar Avith the details of geological arrangement, could not fail to infer 
from such a statement, used for such a purpose, that the Paleeozoic rocks 
are regarded by geologists as forming one group representative of one 
period, Avhich can properly be said to be distinguished as a tcJiole by its 
gorgeous flora; and that it is properly so distinguished for the argument in 
question. It was familiar to the Academy, as well as to Mr. Miller, that 
from the carboniferous rocks downward (backward in order of time), there 
have been discriminated a large number of periods, difffcring from one 
another in mineral and in organic remains; and that the proportion of the 
carboniferous era to the whole scries is small, whether Ave regard the thick- 
ness of its deposits or its conjectural chronology. It is only of this car- 
boniferous era, the latest of this series, that the author's remarks could be 



MOSAIC AND GEOLOGICAL. 173 

of the dhision, represented by its Liassic, Oolitic, and 
Wcalden formations, that the class existed in that abundance 
Avluch rendered it so peculiarly, above every other age, an 
age of creeping things and great sea monsters. And so 

true; and even of this, if taken for the entire surface of the earth, it could 
not be truly asserted that * the evidence is so complete as to be patent to 
all/ that the quantity of its vegetable products distinguishes it from the 
earth's surface during the era in which we live. To confound by implica- 
tion all the periods termed Palaeozoic, so as to apply to them as a whole 
what could be true, if at all, only of the carboniferous period, is a fallacious 
nse of a generalization made for a purpose, and upon a principle not pro- 
perly available for the writer's argument," &c. So far the " Proceedings " 
of the Academy. 

This, surely, is very much the reverse of fair. I, however, refer the 
matter, without note or comment (so far at least as it involves the ques- 
tion whether Mr. Foulke has not, in the face of the most express state- 
ment on my part, wholly misrepresented me), to the judgment of candid 
/ind intelligent readers on both sides of the Atlantic. 

I know not that I should recognize Mr. Foulke as entitled, after such a 
display, to be dealt with simply as the member of a learned society who 
differs from me on a scientific question; nor does his reference to the 
" carboniferous era " as " the latest of the " Palaeozoic " series," and his 
apparent unacquaintance with that Permian period, in reality the tenninal 
one of the division during which the PalaBOzoic forms seem to have grad- 
ually died away, in order to give place to those of the Secondary division, 
inspire any veiy high respect for his acquii-ements as a geologist. Waiving, 
however, the legitimacy of his claim, I may be permitted to repeat, for the 
further information of the non-geological reader, that the carboniferous 
formations, wherever they have yet been detected, justify, in the amazing 
abundance of their carbonized vegetable organisms, the name which they 
bear. Mr. Foulke, in three short sentences, uses the terms " carboniferous 
era," " carboniferous rocks," " carboniferous period," four several times ; 
and these terms are derived from the predominating amount of carbon 
(tilaborated of old by the plants of the period) which occurs in its several 
formations. The very language which he has to employ is of itself a con- 
finnation of the statement which he challenges. For so " patent" is this 
carboniferous character of the system, that it has given to it its universally 
accepted designation,— the verbal sign by which it is represented wherever 
it is known. Mr. F. states, that " if taken for the entire surface of tlie earth," 
it cannot be truly asserted that the carlioniferous flora preponderated over 
that of the present time, or, at least, that it.s preponderance could not be 
15* 



174 THE TWO RECORDS, 

also, in the Tertiary, regarded as but an early portion of 
the human division, there was a period of increase and 
diminution, — a morning and evening of mammalian life. 
The mammals of its early Eocene ages were compara- 

regarded as " patent to all." The statement admits of so many different 
meanings, that I know not whether I shall succeed in replying to the special 
meaning intended by Mr. Foulke. There are no doubt carboniferous de- 
posits on the earth's surface still unknown to the geologist, the evidence 
of which on the point must be regarded, in consequence, not as " patent to 
all," but as nil. They are witnesses absent from court, whose testimony 
has not yet been tendered. But equally certain it is, I repeat, that wher- 
ever carboniferous formations liave been discovered and examined, they 
have been found to bear the unique characteristic to which the system owes 
its name, — they have been found charged with the carbon, existing usually 
as great beds of coal, which was elaborated of old by its unrivalled flora 
from the elements. And as this evidence is certain and positive, no one 
would be entitled to set off against it, as of equal weight, the merely nega- 
tive evidence of some one or two deposits of the carboniferous age that 
did not bear the carboniferous character, even were such known to exist ; 
fai- less is any one entitled to set off against it the possibly negative evidence 
of deposits of the carboniferous age not yet discovered nor examined ; for 
that would be simply to set off against good positive evidence, what is no 
evidence at all. It would be to set off the possible evidence of the absent 
witnesses, not yet precognosced in the case, against the express declara- 
tions of the witnesses already examined, and strong on the positive side. 
Surely an American, before appealing, in a question of this kind, to the 
bare possibility of the existence somewhere or other of barely negative 
evidence, ought to have bethought him of the very extraordinary positive 
evidence furnished by the carboniferous deposits of his own great country. 
The coal fields of Britain and the European continent had been wrought 
for ages ere those of North America were known, and for ages more after 
it had been but ascertained that the New, like the Old World, has its Coal 
Measures. And during the latter period the argument of Mr. Foulke might 
have been employed, just as now, and some member of a learned society 
might have urged that, though the coal fields of Europe bore evidence to 
the former existence of a singularly luxuriant flora, beyond comparison 
more vast than the European one of the present day, the same could not 
be predicated of the American coal fields, whose carbonized remains might 
be found representative of a flora which had been at least not more largely 
developed than that existing American flora to which the great western 
forests belong. Now, however, the time for any such argument has gone 



MOSAIC AND GEOLOGICAL. 175 

tively small in bulk and low in standing ; in its conclud- 
ing ages, too, immediately ere the appearance of man, 
or just as he had appeared, they exhibited, both in size and 
number, a reduced and less imposing aspect. It was chiefly 
in its middle and latter, or Miocene, Pliocene, and Pleisto- 
cene ages, that the myriads of its huger giants, — its dino-/ 
theria, mastodons, and mammoths, — cumbered the soil, I, 
of course, restrict my remarks to the three periods of 
organic life, and have not inquired whether aught analogous 
to these mornings and evenings of increase and diminution 
need be sought after in any of the others. 

Such are a few of the geological facts which lead me to 
believe that the days of the Mosaic account were great 
periods, not natural days; and be it remembered, that 
between the scheme of lengthened periods and the scheme 
of a merely local chaos, which existed no one knows how, 
and of a merely local creation, which had its scene no one 
knows where, geological science leaves us now no choice 
whatever. It has been urged, however, that this scheme 
of periods is irreconcileable with that Divine " reason " for 
the institution of the Sabbath which he who appointed the 

by; the American coalfields have been carefully explored ; and what is the 
result? The geologist has come to know, that even the mighty forests of 
America are inconsiderable, compared with its deposits of coal; nay, that 
all its forests gathered into one heap would fail to furnish the materials of 
a single coal seam equal to that of Pittsburg ; and that centuries after all 
its thick woods shall have disappeared before the axe, and it shall have 
come to present the comparatively bare, umvooded aspect of the long 
civilized countries of Southern Europe, it will continue to derive the ele- 
ments of its commercial greatness, and the cheerful blaze of its many 
millions of domestic hearths, from the unprecedentedly luxurious flora of 
the old carboniferous ages. Truly, very wonderful are the coal fields of 
Northern America ! If geologists inferred, as they well might, that the 
extinct flora which had originated the European coal vastly outri vailed in 
luxuriance that of the existing time, what shall be said of that flora of the 
same age which originated the coal deposits of Nova Scotia and the United 
States,— deposits twmty times as great as aU those of all Europe put together! 



176 THE TWO RECORDS, 

day of old has, in his goodness, vouchsafed to man. I have 
failed to see any force in the objection. God the Creator, 
who wrought during six periods, rested during the seventh 
period; and as we have no evidence whatever that he 
recommenced his work of creation, — as, on the contrary, 
man seems to be the last formed of creatures, — God may 
be resting still. The presumption is strong that his Sab- 
bath is an extended period, not a natural day, and that 
the work of Redemption is his Sabbath day's work. And 
so I cannot see that it in the least interferes with the integ- 
rity of the reason rendered to read it as follows : — Work 
during six periods, and rest on the seventh; for in six 
periods the Lord created the heavens and the earth, and on 
the seventh period He rested. The Divine periods may 
have been very great, — the human periods very small; 
just as a vast continent or the huge earth itself is very 
great, and a map or geograj^hical globe very small. But 
if in the map or globe the proportions be faithfully main- 
tained, and the scale, though a minute one, be true in all its 
parts and applications, we pronounce the map or globe, 
notwithstanding the smallness of its size, a faithful copy. 
Were man's Sabbaths to be kept as enjoined, and in the 
Divine proportions, it would scarcely interfere with the 
logic of the "reason annexed to the fourth commandment," 
though in this matter, as in all others in which man can be 
an imitator of God, the imitation should be a miniature 
one. 

The work of Redemption may, I repeat, be the work 
of God's Sabbath day. What, I ask, viewed as a whole, is 
the prominent characteristic of geologic history, or of that 
corresponding history of creation which forms the grandly 
fashioned vestibule of the sacred volume ? Of both alike 
the leading characteristic is progress. In both ahke do we 
find an upward progress from dead matter to the humbler 



MOSAIC AXD GEOLOGICAL. 177 

forms of vitality, and from thence to the higher. And 
after great cattle and beasts of the earth had, in due order, 
succeeded inanimate plants, sea monsters, and moving 
creatures that had life, the moral agent, man, enters upon 
the scene. Previous to his appearance on earth, each 
succeeding elevation in the long upward march had been 
a result of creation. The creative fiat went forth, and dead 
matter came into existence. The creative fiat went forth, 
and plants, with the lower animal forms, came into exist- 
ence. The creative fiat went forth, and the oviparous 
animals, — birds and reptiles, — came into existence. The 
creative fiat went forth, and the mammiferous animals, — 
cattle and beasts of the earth, — came into existence. 
And, finally, last in the series, the creative fiat went forth, 
and responsible, immortal man, came into existence. But 
has the course of progress come, in consequence, to a close ? 
"No. God's work of elevating, raising, heightening, - — of 
making the high in due progression succeed the low, — 
still goes on. But man's responsibihty, his immortality, his 
God-implanted instincts respecting an eternal future, forbid 
that that work of elevation and progress should be, as in 
all the other instances, a work of creation. To create 
would be to supersede. God's work of elevation now is 
the work of fitting and preparing peccable, imperfect man 
for a perfect, impeccable, future state. God's seventh day's 
work is the work of Redemption. And, read in this light 
his reason vouchsafed to man for the institution of tl^ 
Sabbath is found to yield a meaning of peculiar breadth 
and emphasis. God, it seems to say, rests on his Sabbath 
from his creative labors, in order that by his Sabbath day's 
work he may save and elevate you. Rest ye also on your 
Sabbaths, that through your co-operation with him in this 
great work ye may be elevated and saved. Made origi- 
nally in the image of God, let God be your pattern and 

/ 



178 THE TWO RECORDS, ETC. 

example. Engaged in your material and temporal employ- 
ments, labor in the proportions in which he labored; but, 
in order that you may enjoy an eternal future with him, 
rest also in the proportions in which he rests. 

One other remark ere I conclude. In the history of the 
earth which we inhabit, molluscs, fishes, reptiles, mammals, 
had each in succession their periods of vast duration ; and 
then the human period began, — the period of a fellow 
worker with God, created in God's own image. What is 
to be the next advance ? Is there to be merely a repetition 
of the past ? — an introduction a second time of man 
made in the image of God ? No. The geologist, in those 
tables of stone which form his records, finds no example of 
dynasties once passed away again returning. There has 
been no repetition of the dynasty of the fish, of the reptile, 
of the mammal. The dynasty of the future is to have 
glorified man for its inhabitant ; but it is to be the dynasty 

— " the hingdom " — not of glorified man made in the 
image of God, but of God himself in the form of man. In 
the doctrine of the two conjoined natures, human and 
Divine, and in the further doctrine that the terminal 
dynasty is to be peculiarly the dynasty of Him in whom 
the natures are united, we find that required progression 
beyond which progress camiot go. We find the point of 
elevation never to be exceeded meetly coincident with the 
f nal period never to be terminated, — the mfinite in height 
harmoniously associated with the eternal in duration. 
Cieation and the Creator meet at one point, and in one 
peison. The long ascending line from dead matter to man 
has been a progress Godwards, — not an asymptotical prog- 
ress, but destined from the beginning to furnish a point of 
unioL ; and occupying that point as true God and true man, 

— as Creator and created, — we recognize the adorable 
Monaich of all the future ! 



LECTURE FOURTH. 

THE MOSAIC VISION OF CREATION. 

The history of creation is introduced into the " Paradise 
"Lost" as a piece of narrative, and forms one of the two 
great episodes of the poem. Milton represents the com- 
mon father of the race as " led on" by a desu*e to know 

" What within Eden or without was done 
Before his memory; " 

and straightway Raphael, " the affable archangel," in com- 
pliance with the wish, enters into a description of the six 
days' work of the Divine Creator, — a description in which, 
as Addison well remarks, " the whole energy of our tongue 
is employed, and the several great scenes of creation rise 
up to view, one after another, in such a manner, that the 
reader seems present at this wonderful work, and to assist 
among the choirs of angels who are spectators of it." In 
the other great episode of the poem, — that in which the 
more prominent changes which were to happen in after time 
upon the earth are made to pass before Adam, he is repre- 
sented as carried by Michael to the top of a great mountain, 
lofty as that on which in a long posterior age the Tempter 
placed our Saviour, and where the coming events are 
described as rising up in \dsion before him. In the earlier 
episode, as in those of the Odyssey and JEneid, in which 
heroes relate in the courts of princes the story of their 
adventures, there is but narrative and description ; in the 



180 THE MOSAIC VISION 

later, a series of magnificent pictures, that form and then 
dissolve before the spectator, and comprise, in their vivid 
tints and pregnant outlines, the future history of a world. 
And one of these two episodes, — that which relates to the 
creation of all tilings, — must have as certainly had a place 
in human history as in the master epic of England. Man 
would have forever remained ignorant of many of those 
events related in the opening chapters of Scripture, w^hich 
took place ere there was a human eye to witness, or a human 
memory to record, had he not been permitted, like Adam 
of old, to hold intercourse with the intelligences that had 
preceded him in creation, or with the great Creator himself, 
the Author of them all ; and the question has been asked 
of late, both in our own country and on the Continent, 
What was the form and nature of the revelation by which 
the pre-Adamic history of the earth and heavens was origi- 
nally conveyed to man ? Was it conveyed, like the sublime 
story of Raphael, as a piece of narrative, dictated, mayhap, 
to the inspired penman, or miraculously borne in upon his 
mind? Or was it conveyed by a succession of sublime 
visions like that which Michael is represented as calling 
up before Adam, when, purging his "visual nerves with 
euphrasy and rue," he enabled him to see, in a series of 
scenes, the history of his offspiing from the crime of Cain 
down to the destruction of the Old World by a flood ? 
The passages in which the history of creation is recorded 
give no intimation whatever of their own history ; and so 
we are left to balance the probabilities regarding the mode 
and form in which they were originally revealed, and to 
found our ultimate conclusions respecting them on evidence, 
not direct, but circumstantial. 

The Continental writers on this curious subject may be 
regarded as not inadequately represented by Dr. J. H. 
Kurtz, Professor of Theology at Dorpat, — one of the many 



OF CREATION. 181 

ingenious biblical scholars of modern Germany. We find 
him stating the question, in his J^ibel unci Astro?iomie 
(second edition, 1849), mth great precision and clearness, 
but in a manner, so far at least as the foi-m of his thinking 
is concerned, strikingly characteristic of what may be termed 
the theological fashion of his country in the present day. 
" The som'ce of all human history," he says, " is eye-witness, 
be it that of the reporter, or of another whose account has 
been handed doAVTi. Only what man has himself seen or 
experienced can be the subject of man's historical composi- 
tions. So that history, so far as man can ^yY\tQ, it, can begin 
with but the point at which he has entered into conscious 
existence, and end with the moment that constitutes the 
present time. Beyond these points, however, lies a great 
province of historic development, existing on the one side 
as the Past, on the other side as the Future. For when 
man begins to be an observer or actor of history, he him- 
self, and the whole circimistantials of his condition, have 
already come historically into being. Xor does the flow of 
development stop with what is his present. JMillions of 
influences are spinning the thread still on ; but no one can 
tell what the compound result of all their energies is to be. 
Both these sorts of history, then, lie beyond the region 
of man's knowledge, which is shut uj) in space and time, 
and can only call the present its own. It is God alone Avho, 
standing beyond and above space and time, sees backwards 
and forA\ards both the development which preceded the first 
pnesent of men, and that which will succeed this our latest 
jyresent. Whatever the difference of the two kinds of his- 
tory may be, they hold the same position in relation both to 
the principle of the human ignorance and the j^rinciple of 
the human knowledge. The principle of the ignorance is 
man's condition as a creature ; the principle of the knowl- 
edge is the Divine knowledge ; and the medium between 
IC 



182 THE MOSAIC VISION 

ignorance and knowledge is objectively Divine revelation, 
and sllbjecti^•ely prophetic vision by man, in which he beholds 
with the eye of the mind what is shut and hid from the eye 
of his body." From these premises Dr. Kurtz goes on to 
argue that the pre-Adamic history of the past being theologi- 
cally in the same category as the yet undeveloped history 
of the future, that record of its leading events which occurs 
in the Mosaic narrative is ^\wx^j prophecy described back- 
wards ; and that, coming under the prophetic law, it ought 
of consequence to be subjected to the prophetic rule of 
exposition. There are some very ingenious reasonings 
employed in fortifying tliis point ; and, after quoting from 
Eichhorn a passage to the effect that the opening chapter in 
Genesis is much rather a creative picture than a creative 
history, and from Amnion to the effect that the ai^sthor of 
it evidently takes the position of a beholder of creation, 
the learned German concludes his general statement by 
remarking, that the scenes of the chapter are prophetic 
tableaux, each containing a leading phase of the drama of 
creation. " Before the eye of the seer," he says, " scene 
after scene is unfolded, until at length, in the seven of them, 
the course of creation, in its main momenta^ has been fully 
represented." The revelation has every characteristic of 
prophecy by vision, — prophecy by eye- witnessing ; and 
may be perhaps best understood by regarding it simply as 
an exhibition of the actual phenomena of creation presented 
to the mental eye of the i^rophet under the ordinary laws 
of perspective, and truthfully described by him in the 
simple language of his time. 

In our own country a similar view has been taken by the 
author of a singularly ingenious little work which issued 
about two years ago frorn the press of Mr. Constable of 
Edinburgh, " The Mosaic Record in Harmony with Geol- 



OF CREATION. 183 

ogy." * The writer, however, exhibits, in dealing with his 
subject, the characteristic sobriety of the Anglo-Saxon 
mind ; and while the leading features of his theory agree 
essentially with those of the Continental one, he does not 
press it so far. In canvassing the forin of the revelation 
made to Moses in the opening of Genesis, he discusses the 
nature of the inspiration enjoyed by that great prophet ; 
and thus retranslates literally from the Hebrew the passage 
in which the Divine Being is himself introduced as speaking 
direct on the point in the controversy raised by Aaron and 
Miriam. " And He [the Lord] said, hear now my words : 
If he [Moses] were your prophet [subordinate, or at least 
not superior, to the prophetess and the high priest], I, 
Jehovah, in the vision to him would make myself known : 
in the dream would I speak to him. Not so my servant 
Moses [God's prophet, not theirs] ; in all my house faithful 



* Such is also the view taken by the author of a recently published work, 
" The Genesis of the Earth and of Man." " Christian philosophers have 
been compelled to acknowledge," says this writer, " that the Mosaic ac- 
count of creation is only reconcileable with demonstrated facts, by its 
being regarded as a record of appearances ; and if so, to vindicate the 
truth of God, we must consider it, so far as the acts are concerned, as the 
relation of a revelation to the sight, which was sufficient for all its purposes, 
rather than as one in words ; though the words are perfectly true as de- 
scribing the revelation itself, and the revelation is equally true as showing 
man the principal phenomena which he would have seen had it been pos- 
sible for him to be a witness of the events. Further, if we view the nar- 
rative as the description of a series of visions, while we find it to be 
perfectly reconcileable with the statement in other parts of Scripture, that 
in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, we remove, with other dif- 
ficulties, the only strong objection to the opinion of those who regard the 
'six days' as periods of undefinable duration, and who may even believe 
that we are now in the ' seventh day,' — the day of rest or of cessation 
from the work of creation. Certainly, ' the day of God,' and ' the day of 
the Lord,' and the ' thousand two hundred and threescore days,' of the 
Revelation of St. John, and the ' seventy weeks ' in the Prophecy of Daniel, 
are not to be understood in their primary and natural senses," &c., &c. 



184 THE MOSAIC VISION 

is he. Mouth to mouth do I speak to him, and vision, but 
not in dark speeches ; and likeness of Jehovah he beholds." 
Moses, then, was favored with "visions without dark 
speeches." 

Now, as implied in the passage thus retranslated, there 
is a grand distinction between symboUc and therefore dark 
visions, and visions not symbolic nor dark. Visions ad- 
dressed, as the word indicates, to the eye, may be obviously 
of a twofold character, — they may be either darker than 
words, or a great deal clearer than words. The vision, for 
instance, of future monarchies which Daniel saw symbolized 
under the form of monstrous animals had to be explained m 
words ; the vision of Peter, which led to the general ad- 
mission of the Gentiles into the Christian Church, had also 
virtually to be explained in words ; they were both visions 
of the dark class ; and revelation abounds in such. But 
there were also visions greatly clearer than words. Such, 
for instance, was the vision of the secret chamber of imagery, 
with its seventy men of the ancients of Israel given over to 
idolatry, which was seen by the prophet as he sat in his 
own house ; and the vision of the worshippers of the sun in 
the inner court of the temple, witnessed from what was 
naturaUy the same impossible point of view; with the 
vision of the Jewish women in the western gate " weeping 
for Thammuz," when, according to Milton's noble version, 

" The love tale 
Infected Sion's daughters with like heat, 
Whose wanton passions in the sacred porch 
Ezekiel saw, when, by the vision led. 
His eye surveyed the dark idolatries 
Of alienated Judah." 

Here, then, were there visions of scenes actually taking 
place at the time, which, greatly clearer than any merely 
verbal description, substituted the seeing of llie eye for the 



OF CREATION. 185 

hearing of the ear. And visions of this latter kind were 
enjoyed, argues the ^vriter of this ingenious treatise, by the 
prophet Moses. 

One of the cases adduced may be best given in the 
author's own words. " Moses," he says, " received direc- 
tions from God how to proceed in constructing the Taber- 
nacle and its sacred furniture ; and David also was instructed 
how the Temple of Solomon should be built. Let us hear 
Scripture regarding the nature of the directions given to 
these men : — 

' According unto the appearance [literally sight, vision] 
v.'hich the Lord had showed unto Moses, so he made the 
candlestick,'' — (Num. 5 : 4.) 

' The whole in writing,, by the hand of Jehovah upon 
mo, he taught; the whole works of the pattern.' — (1 
Chron. 28: 19.) 

*' There was thus a writing in the case of David ; a sight 
or vision of the thing to be made in that of Moses." 

So far the author of the Treatise. He might have added 
further, that from the nature of things, the revelation to 
Moses in this instance must have been " sight or vision," 
if, indeed, what is not in the least likely, the peculiar archi- 
tecture and style of ornament used in the Tabernacle was 
not a borrowed style, already employed in the service of 
idolatry. An old, long established architecture can be 
adequately described by speech or writing ; a new, original 
architecture can be adequately described only by pattern 
or model, that is, by sight or vision. Any intelligent cutter 
in stone or carver in wood could ftirnish to order, though 
the order were merely a verbal one, a Corinthian or Ionic 
capital ; but no such mechanic, however skilful or ingenious, 
could furnish to order, if unprovided with a pattern or 
drawing, a facsimile of one of the ornately sculptured 
capitals of Gloucester Cathedral or York Minster. To 
16* 



186 THE MOSAIC VISION 

ensure a facsimile in any such case, the originals, or rep- 
resentations of them, would require to be submitted to the 
eye, — not merely described to the ear. Nay, from the 
example given in the text, — that of the golden candle- 
stick, — we have an instance furnished in recent times of 
the utter inadequacy of mere description for the purposes 
of the sculptor or artist. Ever since copperplate engrav- 
ings and illustrated Bibles became comparatively common, 
representations of the branched candlestick taken from the 
written description have been common also. The candle- 
stick on the arch of Titus, though not deemed an exact 
representation of the original one described in the Penta- 
teuch, is now regarded, — correctly, it cannot be doubted, 
— as at least the nearest approximation to it extant. 
Public attention was first drawn to this interesting piece of 
sculpture in comparatively modern times ; and it was then 
found that all the previous representations taken from the 
wi'itten description were widely erroneous. They only 
served to show, not the true outlines of the golden candle- 
stick, but merely that inadequacy of verbal description for 
artistic purposes which must have rendered vision^ or, in 
other words, optical representation, imperative in the case 
of Moses. Some of our most sober minded commentators 
take virtually the same view of this necessity of \dsion for 
ensuring the production of the true pattern of the Taber- 
nacle. " The Lord," says Thomas Scott, " not only directed 
Moses by words how to build the Tabernacle and form its 
sacred furniture, but showed him a model exactly rep- 
resenting the form of every part, and the proportion of 
each to all the rest." There must have been clear optical 
vision in the case, — " vision without dark speeches." 
Such, too, was the character of other of the Mosaic visions, 
besides that of the " pattern " seen in the Mount. The 
burning bush, for instance, was a vision addressed to the 



OF CREATION. 187 

eye ; and seemed to come so palpably under the ordinary 
optical laws, that the prophet drew near to examine the 
extraordinary phenomena which it exhibited. 

The visual or optical character of some of the revelations 
made to Moses thus estabhshed, the writer goes on to 
inquire whether that special revelation w^hich exhibits the 
generations of the heavens and earth in their order was 
not a visual revelation also. " Were the words that Moses 
•»vi'ote," he asks, " merely impressed upon his mind ? Did 
he hold the pen, and another dictate ? Or did he see in 
vision the scenes that he describes? The freshness and 
point of the narrative," he continues, " the freedom of the 
description, and the unUkelihood that Moses was an un- 
thinking machine in the composition, all indicate that he 
saw in vision what he has here given us in writing. lie is 
describing from actual observation.'''* The writer remarks 
in an earlier portion of his treatise, that all who have 
adopted the theory advocated in the previous lecture, — 
the " Two Records," which was, I may state, published in 
a separate form, ere the appearance of his work, and which 
he does me the honor of largely quotmg, — go upon the 
supposition that things during the Mosaic days are de- 
scribed as they would appear to the eye of one placed 
upon earth ; and he argues that, as no man existed in those 
distant ages, a reason must be assigned for this popular 
view of creation which the record is rightly assumed to 
take. And certainly, if it was in reality a view described 
from actual vision, the fact would form of itself an ade- 
quate reason. What man had actually seen, though but 
in dream or picture, would of course be described as seen 
hy man: like all human history, it would, to borrow from 
Kurtz, be founded on eye-witnessing ; and the fact that the 
Mosaic record of creation is apparently thus founded, 



188 THE MOSAIC VISION 

affords a strong presumption that it was in reality revealed, 
not by dictation, but by vision. 

Nor, be it remembered, has the recognitio'h of a purely 
optical character in the revelation been restricted to the 
assertion of any one theory of reconciliation. It was as 
certainly held by Chalmers and Dr. Pye Smith, as by Dr. 
Kurtz and the author of this treatise ; nay, it has been 
recognized by not a few of their opponents also. Gran- 
ville Penn, for instance, does not scruple to avow his belief, 
in his elaborate " Estimate of the Mineral and Mosaic Ge- 
ologies," that both sun and moon were created on the first 
day of creation, though they did not become " optically 
visible " until the fourth. " In truth, that the fourth day 
only rendered visible the sidereal creation of the first day, 
is manifested," he says, " by collating the transactions of 
the two days. On the first day, we are told generally, 
*God divided the light, or day, and the darkness, or 
night ; ' but the physical agents which he employed for 
that division are not there declared. On the fourth day, 
we are told referentially, ' God commanded the lights 
[or luminaries] for dividing day and night, to give their 
light upon earth.' Here, then, it is evident from the 
retrospective implication of the latter description, that 
the lights or luminaries for dividing day and night, which 
were to give their light upon the earth for the first time 
on the fourth day, were the unexpressed physical agents 
by which God divided the day and night on the first day." 
Now, whatever may be thought of Mr. Penn's argument 
here, there can be no doubt that it demonstrates at least 
his own belief in the purely optical character of the Mosaic 
account of the sidereal creation. It is an account, he held, 
not of what God wrought on the first day in the heavens, 
but of what a human eye would have seen on the fourth 



OF CREATION. 189 

day from the earth. And Moses Stuart, in his philological 
assault on the geologists, is scarce less explicit in his avowal 
of a similar belief. " Every one sees," he says, " that to 
speak of the sun as rising and setting, is to describe, in 
common parlance, what appears optically^ that is, to our 
sensible view, as reality. But the history of creation is 
a different affair. In one kespect, indeed, there is a re- 
semblance. The historia7i everywhere speahs as an optical 
observer stationed on a point of our v:orld^ and surveying 
from this the heavens and the earthy and speaking of them 
as seen in this manner by his bodily eye. The sun, and 
moon, and stars, are servants of the earth, lighted up to 
garnish and to cheer it, and to be the guardians of its times 
and seasons. Other uses he knows not for them : certainly 
of other uses he does not speak. The distances, magni- 
tudes, orbicular motions, gravitating powers, and projectile 
forces of the planets and of the stars, are all out of the 
circle of his history, and probably beyond his knowledge. 
Inspiration does not make men omniscient. It does not 
teach them the scientific truths of astronomy, or chemistry, 
or botany, nor any science as such. Inspiration is con- 
cerned with teaching religious truths, and such facts or 
occurrences as are connected immediately with illustrating, 
or with impressing them on the mind.'^ Thus far Dr. 
Stuart and Mr. Penn, — men whose evidence on this special 
head must be sufficient to show that it is not merely geolo- 
gists who have recognized an optical or visual character in 
the Mosaic history of creation. And certainly the infer- 
ence deduced from the admitted fact, that is, the inference 
tliat the optical description must have been founded on a 
revelation addressed to the eye, — a revelation by vision, — 
does seem a fair and legitimate one. The revelation must 
have been either a revelation in words or ideas, or a reve- 
lation of scenes and events pictorially exhibited. Failing, 



190 THE MOSAIC VISION 

however, to record its own history, it leaves the student 
equally at liberty, so far as external evidence is concerned, 
to take up either view ; while, so far as internal evidence 
goes, the presumption seems all in favor of revelation by 
vision; for, while no reason can be assigned why, in a 
revelation by word or idea, appearances which took place 
ere there existed a human eye should be optically de- 
scribed, nothing can be more natural or obvious than that 
they should be so described, had they been revealed by 
vision as a piece of eye-witnessmg. It seems, then, at least 
eminently probable that such was the mode or form of the 
revelation in this case, and that he who saw by vision on 
the Mount the pattern of the Tabernacle and its sacred 
furniture, and in the Wilderness of Horeb the bush bm-n- 
ing but not consumed, — types and symbols of the coming 
dispensation and of its Divine Author, — saw also by 
vision the pattern of those successive pre-Adamic creations, 
animal and vegetable, through which our world was fitted 
up as a place of human habitation. The reason why the 
drama of creation has been optically described seems to be, 
that it was in reaUty visionally revealed. 

A further question still remains : If the revelation was by 
vision, that circumstance affords of itself a satisfactory 
reason why the description should be optical ; and, on the 
other hand, since the description is decidedly optical^ the 
presumption is of course strong that the revelation was by 
vision. But why, it may be asked, by vision ? Can the 
presumption be yet further strengthened by showing that 
this visual mode or form was preferable to any other ? Can 
there be a reason, in fine, assigned for the reason^ — for 
that revelation by vision which accounts for the optical 
character of the description ? The question is a difiicult 
one ; but I think there can. There seems to be a peculiar 
fitness in a revelation made by vision, for conveying an 



J^LA 



OF CREATION. 191 

account of creation to various tribes and peoples of various 
degrees of acquirement, and throughout a long course of 
ages in which the knowledge of the heavenly bodies or of the 
earth's history, that is, the sciences of astronomy and geol- 
ogy, did not at first exist, but in which ultimately they came 
to be studied and known. TVe must recognize such a mode 
as equally fitted for the earlier and the more modern times, 
— for the ages anterior to the rise of science, and the ages 
posterior to its rise. The prophet, by describing what he 
had actually seen in language fitted to the ideas of his time, 
would shock no previously existing prejudice that had been 
founded on the apparent evidence of the senses ; he could 
as safely describe the moon as the second great light of 
creation, as he could the sun as its first great light, and both, 
too, as equally subordinate to the planet which we inhabit. 
On the other hand, an enlightened age, when it had come 
to discover this key to the description, would find it opti- 
cally true in all its details. But how differently would not 
a revelation have fared, in at least the earlier time, that was 
strictly scientific in its details, — a revelation, for instance, 
of the great truth demonstrated by Galileo, that the sun 
rests in the centre of the heavens, while the apparently 
immoveable earth sw^eeps with giddy velocity around it; 
or of the great truth demonstrated by Newton, that our 
ponderous planet is kept from falling off into empty space 
by the operation of the same law that impels a descending 
pebble towards the ground ! A great miracle wrought in 
proof of the truth of the revelation might serve to enforce 
the belief of it on the generation to whom it had been 
given; but the generations that followed, to whom the 
miracle Avould exist as a piece of mere testimony, would 
credit, in preference, the apparently surer evidence of their 
senses, and become unbelievers. They would act, all unwit- 
tingly, on the principle of Hume's famous argument, and 



192 THE MOSAIC VISION 

prefer to rest rather on their own experience of the great 
phenomena of nature, than on the doubtful testimony of 
their ancestors, reduced in the lapse of ages to a dim, 
attenuated tradition. Nor would a geological revelation 
have fared better, in at least those periods intermediate 
between the darker and more scientific ages, in which 
ingenious men, somewhat skeptical in their leanings, cultivate 
literature, and look down rather superciliously on the igno- 
rance and barbarism of the past. What would skeptics such 
as Hobbes and Hume have said of an opening chapter in Gene- 
sis that would describe successive periods, — first of mol- 
luscs, star-lihes, and crustaceans, next of fishes, next of rep- 
tiles and birds, then of mammals, and finally of man ; and 
that would minutely portray a period in which there were 
lizards bulkier than elephants, reptilian whales furnished 
w^ith necks slim and long as the bodies of great snakes, and 
flying dragons, whose spread of wing greatly more than 
doubled that of the largest bird ? The world would assur- 
edly not receive such a revelation. Nor, further, have 
scientific facts or principles been revealed to man which he 
has been fiirnished with the ability of observing or discover- 
ing for himself. It is according to the economy of revelation, 
that the truths which it exhibits should be of a kind which, 
lying beyond the reach of his ken, he himself could never 
have elicited. From every view of the case, then, a pro- 
phetic exhibition of the pre-Adamic scenes and events by 
\dsion seems to be the one best suited for the opening chap- 
ters of a revelation vouchsafed for the accomplishment of 
moral, not scientific purposes, and at once destined to be 
contemporary with every stage of civilization, and to address 
itself to minds of every various calibre, and every different 
degree of enlightenment. 

The statement of Dr. Kurtz, that as vision of ]>ro-A(lairJc 
history comes under the samo laws as vision of history stiil 



OF CREATION. 193 

future, it OTiglit therefore to be road by the same rules, 
craves reflection. " Since the source of knowledge for both 
kinds of history," we find him saying, " and not only the 
source, but the means, and manner, and way of coming to 
know, is the same, viz., the eye-witness of the prophet's 
mental eye, it follows that the historical representation 
wliich he who thus comes to know, projects [or portrays], 
in virtue of this eye-witnessing of his, holds the same 
relation to the reality in both the cases we speak of, and 
must be subjected to the same laws of exposition. "We 
thus get this very important rule of interpretation, viz., that 
the representations of pre-human events, which rest upon 
revelation, are to be handled from the same point of view, 
and expoimded by the same laws, as the prophecies and 
representations of future times and events, which also rest 
upon revelation. This, then, is the only proper point of 
view for scientific exposition of the Mosaic history of cre- 
ation ; that is to say, if we acknowledge that it proceeded 
from Divine revelation, not from philosophic speculation or 
experunental investigation, or from the ideas of reflecting 
men." There is certainly food for thought in this striking 
and original view ; and there is at least one simple rule of 
prophetic exposition which may be applied to the pre-Adamic 
history, in accordance with the principle which it suggests. 
After all that a scientific theology has done for the right 
interpretation of prophecy, we find the prediction always 
best read by the fight of its accomplishment. The event 
which it foretold forms its true key ; and when this key is 
wanting, all is uncertainty. The past is comparatively clear. 
The hieroglyphic forms which crowd the anterior portions 
of the prophetic tablet are found wonderfully to harmonize 
(men such as the profound Newton being the judges) with 
those great historic events, already become matter of his- 
tory, which they foreshadowed and symbolized ; but, on the 
17 



194 THE MOSAIC VISION" 

Other hand, the hieroglyphics which occupy the tablet's 
posterior portion, — the hieroglyphics that symbolize events 
still future, — are invincibly difficult and inexplicable, I 
have read several w%rks on prophecy produced in the last 
age, in which the writers were bold enough to quit the clue 
with which history furnishes the student of fulfilled proph- 
ecy, and, with the prophecies yet unfulfilled as their 
guide, to plunge into a troubled sea of speculation regarding 
the history of the future. And I have found that in every 
instance they were deplorably at fault regarding even the 
events that were nearest at hand at the time. History is 
thus the surest interpreter of the revealed prophecies which 
referred to events posterior to the times of the prophet. 
In what shall we find the surest interpretation of the 
revealed prophecies that referred to events anterior to his 
time ? In what light, or on what principle, shall we most 
correctly read the prophetic drama of creation ? In the 
light, I reply, of scientific discovery, — on the principle that 
the clear and certain must be accepted, when attainable, as 
the proper exponents of the doubtful and obscure. What 
fully developed history is to the prophecy which of old 
looked forwards, fully developed science is to the prophecy 
which of old looked backwards. Scarce any one will ques- 
tion whether that portion of the creation drama which deals 
with the heavenly bodies ought to be read in the light of 
established astronomic discovery or no ; for, save by per- 
haps a few of Father Cullen's monks, who can still hold 
that the sun moves round the earth, and is only six feet in 
diameter, all theologians have now received the astronomic 
doctrines, and know that they rest upon a basis at least as 
certain as any of the historic events symbolized in fulfilled 
prophecy. And Avere we to challenge for the established 
geologic doctrines a similar place and position with respect 
to those portions of the drama which deal with the two 



OF CREATION^. 195 

great kingdoms of nature, plant and animal, we might safely 
do so in the belief that the claim will be one day as miiver- 
sally recognized as the astronomic one is now. 

On this principle there may, of course, be portions of the 
prophetic pre-Adamic past of as doubtful interpretation at 
the present time, from the imperfect development of physical 
science, as is any portion of the prophetic future from the 
imperfect development of historic events. The science 
necessary to the interpretation of the one may be as cer- 
tainly still to discover as the events necessary to the inter- 
pretation of the other may be still to take place. Three 
centuries have not yet passed since astronomic science was 
sufficiently developed to form a true key to the various 
notices of the heavenly bodies which occur in Scripture ; 
among the others, to the notice of their final appearance on 
the fourth day of creation. Little more than half a century 
has yet passed since geologic science Avas sufficiently devel- 
oped to influence the interpretation given of the three other 
days' work. And respecting the work of at least the first 
and second days, more especially that of the second, we can 
still but vaguely guess. The science necessary to the right 
understanding of these portions of the prophetic record has 
still, it would seem, to be developed, if, indeed, it be destined 
at all to exist ; and at present we can indulge in but doubtful 
surmises regarding them. What may be termed the three 
geologic days, — the third, fifth, and sixth, — may be held 
to have extended over those Carboniferous periods during 
which the great jDlants were created, — over those Oolitic 
and Cretacious periods during which the great sea monsters 
and birds were created, — and over those Tertiary periods 
during which the great terrestrial mammals werq created. 
For the intervening or fourth day we have that wide space 
represented by the Permian and Triassic periods, which, 
less conspicuous in theu* floras than the period that went 



196 THE MOSAIC VISION 

immediately before, and less conspicuous in their faunas 
than the periods that came immediately after, were marked 
by the decline, and ultimate extinction, of the Palaeozoic 
forms, and the first partially developed beginnings of the 
Secondary ones. And for the first and second days there 
remain the great Azoic period, during which the immensely 
developed gneisses, mica schists, and primary clay slates, 
were deposited, and the two extended periods represented 
by the Silurian and Old Red Sandstone systems. These, 
taken together, exhaust the geologic scale, and may be 
named in their order as, firsts the Azoic day or period; 
second^ the Silurian and Old Red Sandstone day or period ; 
thirds the Carboniferous day or period ; fourth^ the Permian 
and Triassic day or period ; fifths the Oolitic and Cretaceous 
day or period ; and sixths the Tertiary day or period. Let 
us attempt conceiving how they might have appeared pic- 
torially, if revealed in a series of visions to Moses, as the 
successive scenes of a great air-drawn panorama. 

During the Azoic period, ere life appears to have begun 
on our planet, the temperature of the earth's crust seems to 
have been so high, that the strata, at first deposited appar- 
ently in water, passed into a semi-fluid state, became 
strangely waved and contorted, and assumed in its com- 
position a highly crystalline character. Such is peculiarly 
the case with the fundamental or gneiss deposits of the 
period. In the overlying mica schist there is still much of 
contortion and disturbance ; whereas the clay slate, which 
lies over all, gives e\idence, in its more mechanical texture, 
and the regularity of its strata, that a gradual refrigeration 
of the general mass had been taking place, and that the 
close of the Azoic period was comparatively quiet and cool. 
Let us suppose that during the earlier part of this period 
of excessive heat the waters of the ocean had stood at the 
boiling point even at the surface, and much higher in the 



OF CREATION. 197 

profounder depths, and further, that the half-molten crust 
of tlie earth, stretched out over a molten abyss, was so thin 
that it could not support, save for a short time, after some 
convulsion, even a small island above the sea level. ^Yhat, 
in such circimistances, would be the aspect of the scene, 
optically exhibited from some point in space elevated a few 
hundred yards over the sea ? It would be simply a blank, 
in which the intensest glow of fire would fail to be seen at 
a few yards' distance. An inconsiderable escape of steam 
from the safety-valve of a railway engine forms so thick a 
screen, that, as it lingers for a moment, in the passing, 
opposite the carriage windows, the passengers fail to 
discern through it the landscape beyond. A continuous 
stratimi of steam, then, that attained to the height of even 
our present atmosphere, would wrap up the earth in a 
darkness gross and palpable as that of Egypt of old, — a 
darkness through which even a single ray of light would 
fail to penetrate. And beneath this thick canopy the un- 
seen deep would literally "boil as a pot," wildly tempested 
from below ; while from time to time more deeply seated 
convulsion would upheave sudden to the surface vast tracts 
of semi-molten rock, soon again to disappear, and from 
which waves of bulk enormous would roll outwards, to 
meet in wild conflict with the giant waves of other convul- 
sions, or return to hiss and sputter against the intensely 
heated and fast foundering mass, whose violent upheaval 
had first elevated and sent them abroad. Such would be 
the probable state of things during the times of the earlier 
gneiss and mica schist deposits, — times buried dee^ in 
that chaotic night or " evening " which must have con- 
tinued to exist for mayhap many ages after that beginning 
of things in which God created the heavens and the earth, 
and which preceded the first day. To a human eye sta- 
tioned within the cloud, all, as I have said, must have been 
17* 



198 THE MOSAIC VISION 

thick darkness: to eyes Divine, that could have looked 
through the enveloping haze, the appearance would have 
been that described by Milton, as seen by angel and arch- 
angel at the beginning of creation, when from the gates of 
heaven they looked down upon chaos : — 

" On heavenly ground they stood, and from the shore 
They viewed the vast immeasurable abyss, 
Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild, 
Up from the bottom turned by furious heat 
And surging waves, as mountains to assault 
Heaven's height, and with the centre mix the pole." 

At length, however, as the earth's surface gradually 
cooled down, and the enveloping waters sunk to a lower 
temperature, — let us suppose, during the latter times of 
the mica schist, and the earlier times of the clay slate, — 
the steam atmosphere would become less dense and thick, 
and at length the rays of the sun would struggle through, 
at first doubtfully and diffused, forming a faint twilight, 
but gradually strengthening as the latter ages of the slate 
formation passed away, until, at the close of the great 
primary period, day and night, — the one still dim and 
gray, the other wrapped in a pall of thickest darkness, — 
would succeed each other as now, as the earth revolved on 
its axis, and the unseen luminary rose high over the cloud 
in the east, or sunk in the west beneath the undefined and 
murky horizon. And here again the optical appearance 
would be exactly that described by Milton : — 

" ' Let there be light,' said God, and forthwith light 
Ethereal, first of things, quintessence pure, 
Sprung from the deep, and from her native east 
To journey through the airy gloom began, 
Sphered in a radiant cloud, for yet the sun 
Was not : she in a cloudy tabernacle 
Sojourned the while. God saw tJie light was good. 



OF CREATION. 199 

And light from darkness by the hemisphere 
Divided : light the day, and darkness night, 
He named. This was the first day, even and mom." 

The second day's work has been interpreted variously, 
according to the generally received science of the times of 
the various commentators who have dealt with it. Even 
in Milton, though the great poet rejected the earlier idea 
of a solid firmament, we find prominence given to that of a 
vast hollow sphere of " circumfluous waters," which, by 
encircling the atmosphere, kept aloof the " fierce extremes 
of chaos." Later commentators, such as the late Drs. 
Kitto and Pye Smith, hold that the Scriptural analogue 
of the firmament here — by the way, a Greek, not a 
Hebrew idea, first introduced into the Septuagint — was in 
reality simply the atmosphere with • its clouds. " The 
historian" [Moses], says Dr. Kitto, "speaks as things 
would have appeared to a spectator at the time of the 
creation. A portion of the heavy watery vapor had flown 
into the upper regions, and rested there in dense clouds, 
which still obscured the sun ; while below, the whole earth 
was covered with water. Thus we see the propriety with 
which the firmament is said to have divided the waters 
from the waters." It is certainly probable that in a vision 
of creation the atmospheric phenomena of the second great 
act of the creation drama might have stood out with much 
greater prominence to the prophetic eye placed in the 
circumstances of a natural one, than any of its other ap- 
pearances. The invertebrate life of the Silurian period, or 
even the ichthyic life of the earlier Old Red Sandstone 
period, must have been comparatively inconspicuous from 
any sub-aerial point of view elevated but a few hundred 
feet oVer the sea level. Even the few islets of the latter 
ages of the period, with their ferns, lepidodendra, and 
coniferous trees, forming, as they did, an exceptional 



200 THE MOSAIC VISION 

feature in these ages of vast oceans, and of organisms all but 
exclusively marine, may have well been excluded from a 
representative diorama that exhibited optically the grand 
characteristics of the time. Further, it seems equally 
probable that the introduction of organized existence on 
oir planet was preceded by a change in the atmospheric 
conditions which had obtained during the previous period, 
in which the earth had been a desert and empty void. We 
know that just before the close of the Silurian ages terres- 
trial plants had appeared, and that before the close of the 
Old Red Sandstone ages, air-breathing animals had been 
produced; and infer that the atmosphere in which both 
could have existed must have been considerably different 
from that which lay dark and heavy over the bare hot 
rocks, and tenantless, steam-emitting seas, of the previous 
time. Under a gray, opaque sky, in which neither sun nor 
moon appear, we are not unfrequently presented with a 
varied drapery of clouds, — a drapery varied in form, 
though not in color : bank often seems piled over bank, 
shaded beneath and lighter above; or the whole breaks 
into dappled cloudlets, which bear — to borrow from the 
poetic description of Bloomfield — the "beauteous sem- 
blance of a flock at rest." And if such aerial draperies 
appeared in this early period, with the clear space between 
them and the earth which we so often see in gray, sunless 
days, the optical aspect must have been widely difierent 
from that of the previous time, in which a dense vaporous 
fog lay heavy upon rock and sea, and extended from the 
earth's surface to the upper heights of the atmosphere. 

The third day's vision seems to be more purely geological 
in its character than either of the previous two. Extensive 
tracts of dry land appear, and there springs up over them, 
at the Divine command, a rank vegetation. And we know 
that what seems to be the corresponding Carboniferous 



OF CREATION. 201 

period, unlike any of the preceding ones, was remarkable 
for its great tracts of terrestrial surface, and for its extra- 
ordinary flora. For the first time dry land, and organized 
bodies at once bulky enough, and exhibited in a medium 
clear enough, to render them conspicuous objects in a dis- 
tant prospect, appear in the Mosaic drama ; and we still 
find at once evidence of the existence of extensive though 
apparently very flat lands, and the remains of a wonder- 
fully gigantic and abundant vegetation, in what appear to 
be the rocks of this period. The vision of the fourth day, 
like that of the second, pertained not to the earth, but to 
the heavens; the sun, moon, and stars become visible, and 
form the sole subjects of the prophetic description. And 
just as, during the second period, the earth would in all 
probability have failed to furnish any feature of mark 
enough to divert a human eye placed on a command- 
ing station from the conspicuous atmospheric phenom- 
ena of the time, so it seems equally probable that during 
this fourth period it would have failed to furnish any 
feature of mark enough to divert a human eye from the 
still more conspicuous celestial phenomena of the time. 
As has been already incidentally remarked, the Permian 
and Triassic periods were " epochs " — to employ the 
language of the late Professor Edward Forbes — " of 
gi-eat poverty of production of generic types." On the 
other hand, the appearance for the first time of sun, moon, 
and stars, must have formed a scene well suited to divert 
the attention of the seer from every other. Nor (as has 
been somewhat rashly argued by Dr. Kitto and several 
others) does it seem irrational to hold that three very 
extended periods should have elapsed ere the sidereal 
heavens became visible on earth. Addison's popular iUus- 
tration, drawn from one of the calculations of Newton, 
made in an age when comets were believed to be solid 



202 THE MOSAIC VISION 

bodies, rendered the reading public familiar, considerably 
more than a century ago, with the vast time which large 
bodies greatly heated would take in cooling. " According 
to Sir Isaac Newton's calculation," said the exquisitely 
classical essayist, " the comet that made its appearance in 
1680 imbibed so much heat by its approaches to the sun, 
that it would have been two thousand times hotter than 
red hot iron had it been a globe of that metal ; and that, 
supposing it as big as the earth, and at the same distance 
from the sun, it would be fifty thousand years in cooling 
before it recovered its natural temper." Such was an 
estimate of the philosopher, that excited no little wonder 
in the days of our great grandfathers, for the vast time 
which it demanded ; and, now that the data on which such 
a calculation ought to be founded are better known than 
in the age of Newton, yet more time would be required 
still. It is now ascertained, from the circumstance that no 
dew is deposited in our summer evenings save under a 
clear sky, that even a thin covering of cloud, — serving as 
a robe to keep the earth warm, — prevents the surface heat 
of the planet from radiating into the spaces beyond. And 
such a cloud, thick and continuous, as must have wrapped 
round the earth as with a mantle during the earlier 
geologic periods, must have served to retard for many 
ages the radiation, and consequently the reduction, of 
that internal heat of which it was itself a consequence,, 
Further, the rocks and soils that form the surface of 
our globe would be much more indifferent conductors of 
heat than the iron superficies of Newton's ball, and would 
serve yet more to lengthen out the cooling process. 
Nor would a planet covered over for ages with a thick 
screen of vapor be a novelty even yet in the universe. It 
is doubtful whether astronomers have ever yet looked on 
the face of Mercury : it is at least very generally held that 



OF CREATION. 203 

hitherto only his clouds have been seen. Even Jupiter, 
though it is thought his mountains have been occasionally 
detected raising their peaks through openings in his cloudy 
atmosphere, is known chiefly by the dark shifting bands 
that, fleaking his surface in the line of his trade winds, 
belong not to his body, but to his thick dark covering. 
It is questionable whether a human eye on the surface of 
Mercury would ever behold the sun, notwithstanding his 
near proximity ; nor would he be often visible, if at all, 
from the surface of Jupiter. Nor, yet further, would a 
warm steaming atmosphere muffled in clouds have been 
unfavorable to a rank, flowerless vegetation like that of the 
Coal Measures. There are moist, mild, cloudy days of 
spring and early summer that rejoice the heart of the 
farmer, for he knows how conducive they are to the young 
growth on his fields. The Coal Measure climate would 
have consisted of an unbroken series of these, with may- 
hap a little more of cloud and moisture, and a great deal 
more of heat. The earth would have been a vast green- 
house covered with smoked glass ; and a vigorous though 
mayhap loosely knit and faintly colored vegetation would 
have luxuriated under its shade. 

The fifth and sixth days, — that of winged fowl and great 
sea monsters, and that of cattle and beasts of the earth, — 
I must regard as adequately represented by those Secondary 
ages, Oolitic and Cretaceous, during which birds were intro- 
duced, and reptiles received their greatest development, and 
those Tertiary ages during which the gigantic mammals 
possessed the earth and occupied the largest space in cre- 
ation. To the close of this latter period, — the evening of 
the sixth day, — man belongs, — at once the last created of 
terrestrial creatures, and infinitely beyond comparison the 
most elevated in the scale ; and with man's appearance on 
the scene the days of creation end, and the Divine Sabbath 



204 THE MOSAIC VISION 

begins, — that Sabbath of rest from creative labor of which 
the proper work is the moral development and elevation of 
the species, and which will tei-minate only with the full com- 
pletion of that sublime task on the full accomplishment of 
which God's eternal purposes and the tendencies of man's 
progressive nature seem alike directed. Now, I am greatly 
mistaken if we have not in the six geologic periods all the 
elements, without misplacement or exaggeration, of the 
Mosaic drama of creation, 

I have referred in my brief survey to extended periods. 
It is probable, however, that the prophetic vision of creation, 
if such was its character, consisted of only single represent- 
ative scenes, embracing each but a point of time ; it was, 
let us suppose, a diorama, over whose shifting pictures the 
curtain rose and fell six times in succession, — once during 
the Azoic period, once during the earlier or middle Palaso- 
zoic period, once during the Carboniferous period, once dur- 
ing the Permian or Triassic period, once during the Oolitic 
or Cretaceous period, and finally, once during the Tertiary 
period. Dr. Kurtz holds, taking the Sabbath into the series, 
that the division into seven scenes or stages may have been 
regulated with reference to the importance and sacredness 
of the mythic number seven, — the symbol of completeness 
or perfection ; but the suggestion will perhaps not now carry 
much weight among the theologians of Britain, whatever it 
might have done two centuries ago. It is true, that creation 
might have been exhibited, not by seven, but by seven hun- 
dred, or even by seven thousand scenes; and that the 
accomplished man of science, skilled in every branch of 
physics, might have found something distinct in them all. 
But not the less do the seven, or rather the six, exhibited 
scenes appear to be not symbolic or mystical, at least not 
exclusively symbolic or mystical, but truly representative of 
successive periods, strongly distinctive in their character, 



OF CREATION. 2(5 

and capable, with the three geologic days as given points in 
the problem, of being treated geologically. Another of tlie 
questions raised, both by the German doctor and the writer 
in our own country, must be recognized as eminently sugges- 
tive. " "We treat the history of creation," says Dr. Kurtz, 
" with its six days' work, as a connected series of so many 
prophetic visions. The appearance and evanishing of each 
such vision seem to the seer as a morning and an evening, 
apparently because these were presented to him as an 
increase and decrease of light, like morning and evening 
twilight." And we find the Scottish writer taking essen- 
tially the same view. " Each day contains," he says, " the 
description of what he [Moses] beheld in a single vision, and 
when it faded it was twilight. There is nothing forced in 
supposing that, after the vision had for a time illumined the 
fancy of the seer, it was withdrawn from his eyes, in the 
same way that the landscape becomes dim on the approach 
of evening. . . . From this point of view, a 'day' can 
only mean the period during which the Divinely enlightened 
fancy of the seer was active. When all continued bright 
and manifest before his entranced but still conscious soul, it 
was 'day' or 'light.' When the dimness of departing 
enlightenment fell upon the scene, it was the evening twi- 
light." The day 8^ then, are removed, we find, by the holders 
of this view, altogether from the province of chronology to 
the province of prophetic vision ; they are represented sim- 
ply as parts of the exhibited scenery, or rather as forming 
the measures of the aj^parent time during which the scenery 
was exhibited. We must also hold, however, that in the 
character of symbolic days they were as truly representative 
of the lapse of foregone periods of creation as the scenery 
itself was representative of the creative work accomplished 
in these periods. For if the apparent days occurred in only 
the vision, and were not symbolic of foregone periods, they 
18 



206 THE MOSAIC VISION 

could not have been transferred with any logical propriety 
from the vision itself to that which the vision represented, 
as we find done in what our Shorter Catechism terms " the 
reason annexed to the Fourth Commandment." * The days 
must have been prophetic days, introduced, indeed, into the 
panorama of creation as mayhap mere openings and drop- 
pings of the curtain, but not the less symbolic of that series 
of successive periods, each characterized by its own pro- 
ductions and events, in which creation itself was comprised. 
Nothing more probable, however, than that even Moses 
himself may have been unacquainted with the extent of the 
periods represented in the vision ; nay, he may have been 
equally unconscious of the actual extent of the seeming 
days by which they were symbolized. " Visions without 
dark speeches," — visions, not of symbolic apparitions, but 
of actual existences and events, past or present, — may, nay 
must, have differed from what may be termed the dark 
hieroglyphic visions ; but we find in all visions an element 
of mere representative value introduced when they deal 
with time, and that they occur as if wholly outside its pale. 
These creation "days" seem, in relation to what they typify, 
to have been, if I may so express myself the mere imodules ] 
of a graduated scale. (^a^^^^J 

Such a description of the creative vision of Moses as the 
one given by Milton of that vision of the future, which he 
represents as conjured up before Adam by the archangel, 
would be a task rather for the scientific poet than for the 
mere practical geologist or sober theologian. Let us sup- 
pose that it took place far from man, in an untrodden recess 
of the Midian desert, ere yet the vision of the burning bush 
had been vouchsafed ; and that, as in the vision of St. John 

* "For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all 
that in them is, and rested the seventh day : wherefore the Lord blessed 
the Sabbath day, and hallowed it." 



OF CREATION. 207 

ill Patmos, voices were mingled with scenes, and the ear as 
certainly addressed as the eye. A "great darkness" first 
falls upon the prophet, like that which in an earlier age fell 
npon Abraham, but without the "horror;" and, as the 
Divine Sj^irit moves on the face of the wildly troubled 
waters, as a visible aurora enveloped by the pitchy cloud, 
the great doctrine is orally enunciated, that " m the begin- 
ning God created the heavens and the earth." Unreckoned 
ages, condensed in the vision into a few brief moments, pass 
away; the creative voice is again heard, "Let there be 
light," and straightway a gray diffused light springs up in 
the east, and, casting its sickly gleam over a cloud-Umited 
expanse of steaming, yaporous sea, journeys through the 
heavens towards the west. One heavy, sunless day is made 
the representative of myriads ; the faint light waxes fainter, 
— it sinks beneath the dim, undefined horizon ; the first 
scene of the drama closes upon the seer ; and he sits awhile 
on his hill-top in darkness, solitary but not sad, in what 
seems to be a calm and starless night. 

The light again brightens, — it is day; and over an 
expanse of ocean without visible bound the horizon has 
become wider and sharper of outline than before. There is 
life in that great sea,^ — invertebrate, mayhap also ichthjdc, 
life ; but, from the comparative distance of the point of 
view occupied by the prophet, only the slow roll of its waves 
can be discerned, as they rise and fall in long undulations 
before a gentle gale ; and what most strongly impresses the 
eye is the change which has taken place in the atmospheric 
scenery. That lower stratum of the heavens occupied in 
the previous vision by seething steam, or gray, smoke-like 
fog, is clear and transparent ; and only in an upper region, 
where the previously invisible vapor of the tepid sea has 
thickened in the cold, do the clouds appear. But there, in 
the higher strata of the atmosphere they lie, thick and 



208 THE MOSAIC VISION 

manifold, — an upper sea of great waves, separated fn^in 
those beneath by the transparent firmanent, and, like them 
too, impelled in rolling masses by the wind. A mighty 
advance has taken place in creation; but its most conspicu- 
ous optical sign is the existence of a transparent atmosphere, 
— of a firmanent stretched out over the earth, that sepa- 
rates the waters above fi*om the waters below. But dark- 
ness descends for the third time upon the seer, for the 
evening and the morning have completed the second day. 

Yet again the light rises under a canopy of cloud ; but 
the scene has changed, and there is no longer an unbroken 
expanse of sea. The white surf breaks, at the distant hori- 
zon, on an insulated reef, formed mayhap by the Silurian or 
Old Red coral zoophytes ages before, during the bygone 
yesterday ; and beats in long lines of foam, nearer at hand, 
against a low, winding shore, the seaward barrier of a 
widely spread country. For at the Divine command the 
land has arisen from the deep, — not inconspicuously and in 
scattered islets, as at an earlier time, but in extensive thougii 
flat and marshy continents, little raised over the sea level ; 
and a yet further fiat has covered them Avith the great car- 
boniferous flora. The scene is one of mighty forests of 
cone-bearing trees, — of palms, and tree-ferns, and gigantic 
club mosses, on the opener slopes, and of great reeds clus- 
tering by the sides of quiet lakes and dark rolling rivers. 
There is deep gloom in the recesses of the thicker woods, 
and low thick mists creep along the dank marsh or sluggish 
stream. But there is a general lightening of the sky over 
head ; as the day declines, a redder flush than had hitherto 
lighted up the prospect falls athwart fern covered bank and 
long withdrawing glade. And while the fourth evening 
has fallen on the prophet, he becomes sensible, as it wears 
on, and the fourth dawn approaches, that yet another change 
has taken place. The Creator has spoken, and the stars 



OF CREATION. 209 

look out from openings of deep unclouded blue ; and as day- 
rises, and the planet of morning pales in the east, the broken 
cloudlets are transmuted from bronze into gold, and anon 
the gold becomes fire, and at length the glorious sun arises 
out of the sea, and enters on his course rejoicing. It is a 
brilliant day ; the waves, of a deeper and softer blue than 
before, dance and sparkle in the light ; the earth, with little 
else to attract the gaze, has assumed a garb of brighter 
green ; and as the sun declines amid even richer glories than 
those which had encircled his rising, the moon appears full 
orbed in the east, — to the human eye the second great 
limiinary of the heavens, — and climbs slowly to the zenith 
as night advances, shedding its mild radiance on land and 
sea. 

Again the day breaks ; the prospect consists, as before, 
of land and ocean. There are great pine woods, reed- 
covered swamps, wide plains, winding rivers, and broad 
lakes ; and a bright sun shines over all. But the landscape 
derives its interest and novelty from a feature unmarked 
before. Gigantic birds stalk along the sands, or wade far 
into the water in quest of their ichthyic food ; while birds 
of lesser size float upon the lakes, or scream discordant in 
hovering flocks, thick as insects in the calm of a summer 
evening, over the narrower seas, or brighten with the sunlit 
gleam of their wings the thick woods. And ocean has its 
monsters : great " tanninim " tempest the deep, as they 
heave their huge bulk over the surface, to inhale the life- 
sustaining air; and out of their nostrils goeth smoke, as 
out of a " seething pot or cauldron." Monstrous creatures, 
armed in massive scales, haunt the rivers, or scour the flat 
rank meadows ; earth, air, and w^ater are charged with 
animal life ; and the sun sets on a busy scene, in which un- 
erring instinct pursues unremittingly its few simple ends, — 
the support and preservation of the individual, the propa* 
18* 



210 THE MOSAIC VISION OP CREATION. 

gation of the species, and the protection and maintenance 
of the young. 

Again the night descends, for the fifth day has closed ; 
and morning breaks on the sixth and last day of creation. 
Cattle and beasts of the fields graze on the plains ; the 
thick-skinned rhinoceros wallows in the marshes ; the squat 
hippopotamus rustles among the reeds, or plunges sullenly 
into the river; great herds of elephants seek their food 
amid the young herbage of the woods ; while animals of 
fiercer nature, — the lion, the leopard, and the bear, — 
harbor in deep caves till the evening, or lie in wait for 
their prey amid tangled thickets, or beneath some broken 
bank. At length, as the day wanes and the shadows 
lengthen, man, the responsible lord of creation, formed in 
God's own image, is introduced u]3on the scene, and the 
work of creation ceases forever upon the earth. The night 
falls once more upon the prospect, and there dawns yet 
another morrow, — the morrow of God's rest, — that Divine 
Sabbath in which there is no more creative labor, and 
which, "blessed and sanctified" beyond all the days that 
had gone before, has as its special object the moral eleva- 
tion and final redemption of man. And over it no evening 
is represented in the record as falling, for its special work 
is not yet complete. Such seems to have been the sublime 
panorama of creation exhibited in vision of old to 

" The shepherd who first taught the chosen seed. 
In the beginning how the heavens and earth 
Rose out of chaos; " 

and, rightly understood, I know not a single scientific truth 
that militates against even the minutest or least prominent 
of its details. 



LECTURE FIFTH. 

GEOLOGY m ITS BEARINGS ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 
PART I. 

The science of the geologist seems destined to exert a 
marked influence on that of the natural theologian. For 
not only does it greatly add to the materials on which the 
natural theologian founds his deductions, by adding to the 
organisms, plant and animal, of the present creation the 
extinct organisms of the creations of the past, with all 
their extraordinary display of adaptation and design ; but 
it afibrds him, besides, materials peculiar to itself, in the 
history which it furnishes both of the appearance of these 
organisms in time, and of the wonderful order in which 
they were chronologically arranged. Not only — to borrow 
from Paley's illustration — does it enable him to argue on 
the old grounds, from the contrivance exhibited in the 
icatch found on the moor, that the watch could not have 
lain upon the moor forever ; but it establishes further, on 
different and more direct evidence, that there was a time 
when absolutely the watch was not there ; nay, further, so 
to speak, that there was a previous time in which no 
watches existed at all, but only water clocks ; yet, further, 
that there was a time in which there were not even water 
clocks, but only sundials ; and further, an earlier time still 
in which sundials were not, nor any measurers of time of 
any kind. And this is distinct ground fi'om that urged by 
Paley. For, besides holding that each of these contrivances 



212 GEOLOGY IN" ITS BEARINGS 

must have had in turn an originator or contriver, it adds 
historic fact to philosophic inference. Geology takes up the 
master volume of the greatest of the natural theologians, 
and, after scanning its many apt instances of palpable 
design, drawn from the mechanism of existing plants and 
animals, authoritatively decides that not one of these plants 
or animals had begun to be in the times of the Chalk ; nay, 
that they all date their origin from a period posterior to 
that of the Eocene. And the fact is, of course, corrobora- 
tive of the inference. "That well constructed edifice," 
says the natural theologian, " cannot be a mere his us 
naturce^ or chance combination of stones and wood ; it 
must have been erected by a builder." "Yes," remarks 
the geologist, " it was erected some time during the last 
nine years. I passed the way ten years" ago, and saw only 
a blank space where it now stands." Nor does the estab- 
hshed fact of an absolute beginning of organic being seem 
more pregnant with important consequences to the science 
of the natural theologian than the fact of the peculiar order 
in which they begin to be. 

The importance of the now demonstrated fact, that all 
the living organisms which exist on earth had a begin- 
ning, and that a time was when they were not, will be best 
appreciated by those who know how much, and, it must be 
added, how unsuccessfully, writers on the evidences have 
labored to convict of an absurdity, on this special head, 
the atheistic assertors of an infinite series of beino-s. 
Even Robert Hall (in his famous Sermon on Modern 
Infidehty) could but play, when he ajttempted grappling 
with the subject, upon the words time and eternity^ and 
strangely argue, that as each member of an infinite series 
must have begun in time^ while the succession itself was 
eternal^ it was palpably absurd to ask us to believe in a 
succession of beings that was thus infinitely earlier than 



ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 213 

any of the beings themselves which composed the succes- 
sion. And Bentley, more perversely ingenious still, could 
assert, that as each of the individuals in an infinite series 
must have consisted of many parts, — that as each man 
in such a series, for instance, must have had ten fingers 
and ten toes, — it was palpably absurd to ask us to believe 
in an infinity which thus comprised many infinities, — ten 
infinities of fingers, for example, and ten infinities of toes. 
The infidels had the better in this part of the argument. 
It was surely easy enough to show against the great 
preacher, on the one hand, that thiie in such a question is 
but a mere word that means simply a certain limited or 
definite period which had a beginning, whereas eternity 
means an unlimited and uhdefinable period which had no 
beginning; — that his seeming argument was no argument,, 
but merely a sort of verbal play on this difierence of sig- 
nification in the words; — further, that man could conceive 
of an infinite series, whether extended in infinite space, or 
subsisting in infinite time, just as well as he could conceive 
of any other infinity, and in the same way ; and that the 
only mode of disproving the possibility of such a series 
would be to show, what of course cannot be shown, that in 
conceiving of it in the progressive mode in which, accord- 
ing to Locke, man can alone conceive of the infinite or 
the eternal, there would be a point reached at which it 
would be impossible for him to go on adding millions on 
millions to the previous sum. The symbolic " ad wfinitum''^ 
could be made as adequately r^j^esentative in the case of 
an infinite series of men or animals in unlimited time, as of 
an infinite series of feet or inches in unlimited space, or of 
an infinite senes of holirs^ or 'iHinutes in the past ^ejnity. 
And as for Bentley, dn the other hand, he ought surely to 
have known that all infinities are not equal, seeing that 
Newton had expressly told him so in the second of his 



1 



\ 



214 " GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS 

four famous letters ; but that, on the contrary, one infinity 
may be not only ten times greater than another mfinity, 
but even infinitely greater than another infinity ; and that 
so the conception of an infinity of men possessed of ten 
infinities of fingers and toes is in no respect an absurdity. 
Of the three infinities possible in space, the second is 
infinitely greater than the first, and the third infinitely 
greater than the second. A line infinitely produced is 
capable of being divided into — that is, consists of — an 
infinity of given parts ; a plane infinitely extended is 
capable of being divided into an infinity of infinitely 
divisible lines ; and a cube, that is, a solid, infinitely ex- 
panded, is capable of being divided into an infinity of 
infinitely divisible planes. In fine, metaphysic theology 
furnishes no argument against the infinite series of the 
atheist. But geology does. Every plant and animal that 
now lives upon earth began to be during the great Tertiary 
period, and had no place among the plants and animals of 
the great Secondary division. We can trace several of 
our existing quadrupeds, such as the badger, the hare, the 
fox, the red deer, and the wild cat, up till the earlier times 
of the Pleistocene ; and not a few of our existing shells, 
such as the great pecten, the edible oyster, the whelk, and 
the Pelican' s-foot shell, up till the greatly earlier times of 
the Coraline Crag. But at certain definite lines in the 
deposits of the past, representative of certain points in the 
course of time, the existing mammals and molluscs cease to 
appear, and we find their places occupied by other mam- 
mals and molluscs. Even such of our British shells as 
seem to have enjoyed as species the longest term of life 
cannot be traced beyond the times of the Pliocene deposits. 
We detect their remains in a perfect state of keeping in 
almost every shell-bearing bed, till we reach the Red and 
Coraline Crags, where we find 'hem for the last time ; and. 



ox THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 215 

on passing into older and deeper lying beds, we see their 
places taken by other shells, of species altogether distinct. 
The very common shell Purpura lapillus^ for instance, is 
found in onr raised beaches, in our Clyde beds, in our 
boulder clays and mammaliferous crags, and, finally, in the 
Red Crag, beyond which it fails to appear. And such also 
is the history of the common edible mussel and common 
periwinkle ; whereas the common edible cockle, and com- 
mon edible j^ecten (P. opercxdaris) occur not only in ail 
these successive beds, but in the Coral Crag also. They 
are older by a whole deposit than their present contempo- 
raries, the mussel and periwinkle ; and these, in turn, seem 
of older standing than shells such as Murex erinaceiis^ that 
has not been traced beyond the times of the mammalifer- 
ous crag, or than shells such as Scrohiaularia piperata., that 
has not been detected in more ancient deposits than raised 
sea beaches of the later periods, and the elevated bottoms 
of old estuaries and lagoons. We thus know, that in 
certain periods, nearer or more remote, all our existing 
molluscs began to exist, and that they had no existence 
during the previous periods ; which were, however, richer 
in animals of the same great molluscan group than the 
present time. Our British group of recent marine shells 
falls somewhat short of four hundred species ; * whereas 
the group characteristic of the older Miocene deposits, 
largely developed in those districts of France which boi-- 
der on the Bay of Biscay, and more sparingly in the south 
of England, near Yarmouth, comprises more than six 
hundred species. Nearly an equal number of still older 
shells have been detected in a single deposit of the Paris 

* Forbes and Hanley enumerate one hundred and sixty bivalves, and 
two hundred and thirty-two univalves, — in all three hundred and ninety- 
two species, as the only known shell-bearing molluscs of the existing Brit- 
ish seas. *^ 



216 GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS 

basin, — the Calcaire grossier; and a good many more m 
a more ancient formation still, the London Clay. On 
entering the Chalk, we find a yet older group of shells, 
wholly unlike any of the preceding ones ; and in the Oolite 
and Lias yet other and different groups. And thus group 
preceded group throughout all the Tertiary, Secondary, 
and Palaeozoic periods ; some of them remarkable for the 
number of species which they contained, others for the 
profuse abundance of their individual specimens, until, 
deep in the rocks at the base of the Silurian system, we 
detect what seems to be the primordial group, beneath 
which only a single animal organism is known to occur, — 
the Oldhamia antiqua^ — a plant-like zoophyte, akin ap- 
parently to some of our recent sertularia. (See fig. 5, 
page 48.) Each of the extinct groups had, we find, a 
beginning and an end ; — there is not in the wide domain 
of physical science a more certain fact ; and every species 
of the group which now exists had, like all their j^redeces- 
sors on the scene, their beginning also. The "infinite 
series " of the atheists of former times can have no place 
in modern science ; all organic existences, recent or extinct, 
vegetable or animal, have had their beginning; — there 
was a time when they were not. The geologist can indi- 
cate that time, if not by years, at least by periods, and 
show what its relations were to the periods that went 
before and that came after ; and as it is equally a recog- 
nized truth on both sides of the controversy, that as some- 
thing now exists, something must have existed forever, and 
as it must now be not less surely recognized, that that some- 
thing was not the race of man, nor yet any other of the 
many races of man's predecessors or contemporaries, the 
question, What then was that something? comes with a 
point and directness which it did not possess at any former 
time. By what, or through whom, did these r^ces of 



ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 217 

nicely organized plants and animals begin to be ? Hith- 
erto at least there has been but one reply to the question 
originated on the skeptical side. All these races, it is said, 
have been developed^ in the long course of ages, into what 
they now are, as the young anunal is developed in the 
womb, or the young plant is developed from the seed. 
Topsy, in the novel, " 'spected that she was not made, but 
growed ; " and the only class of opponents which the 
geological theist finds in the field which his science has laid 
open to the world is a class that hold by the j^hilosophy of 
Topsy. 

Let me briefly remark regarding this development hypo- 
thesis, with which I have elsewhere dealt at considerable 
length, that while the facts of the geologist are demonstra- 
bly such, that is, truths capable of proof, the hypothesis is 
a mere dream, unsupported by a shadow of evidence. A 
man of a lively imagination could no doubt originate many 
such dreams ; nay, we know that in the dark ages dreams 
of the kind were actually originated. The Anser Bernida^ 
or barnacle goose, a common winter visitant of our coasts, 
was once believed to be developed out of decaying wood 
long submerged in sea water ; and one of our commonest 
cirripedes or barnacles, Lepas anatifera^ still bears, in its 
specific name of the goose-producing lepas^ evidence that 
it was the creature specially recognized by our ancestors as 
the half developed goose. As if in memory of this old 
development legend, the bird still bears the name of the 
barnacle, and the barnacle of the bird ; and we know fur- 
ther, that very intelligent men for theii* age, such as 
Gerardes the herbaUst (159*7), and Hector Boece the his- 
torian (1524), both examined these shells, and, knowing 
but little of comparative anatomy, were satisfied that the 
animal within was the partially developed embryo of a 
fowl. Such was one of the fables gravely credited as a 
19 



218 GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS 

piece of natural history in Britain about three centuries 
ago, and such was the kind of evidence by which it waa 
supported. And we know that the followers of Epicurus 
received from their master, without apparent suspicion, 
fables still more extravagant, and that wanted e-\'en such a 
shadow of proof to support them as satisfied the herbalist 
and the historian. The Epicureans at least professed to 
believe that the earth, after spontaneously producing herbs 
and trees, began to produce in great numbers mushroom- 
like bodies, that, when they came to maturity, burst open, 
giving* egress each to a young animal, which proved the 
founder of a rax3e ; and that thus, in succession, aU the 
members of the animal kingdom were ushered into exist- 
ence. But whether the dream be that of the Epicureans 
of classic times, or that of the naturalists of the middle 
ages, or that of the Lamarckians of our own days, it is 
equally a dream, and can have no place assigned to it 
among either the solid facts or the sober deductions of 
science. I^ay, the dream of the Lamarckians labors under 
a special disadvantage, from which the dreams of the others 
are free. If some modern Boece or Epicurus were to assert 
that at certain definite periods, removed from fifteen to 
fifty thousand years from the present time, all our existing 
animals Avere developed from decaying Avood, or from a 
Avonderful kind of mushrooms that the earth produced only 
once every ten thousand years, the assertion, if incapable 
of proof, Avould be at least equally incapable of being clis- 
proven. But Avhen the Lamarckian aflirms that all our 
recent species of plants and animals were develoj)ed out 
of previously existing plants and annuals of species entirely 
difierent, he afiii-ms Avhat, if true, would be capable of 
proof; and so, if it cannot be proA'en, it is only because it 
is not true. The trilobitcs have been extinct ever since 
the times of the Mountain Limestone ; and yet, by series 



ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 219 

of specimens, the individual development of certain species 
of this family, almost from the extrusion of the animal from 
the egg mitil the attainment of its full size, has been satis- 
factorily shown. By specimen after specimen has every 
stage of growth and every degree of development been ex- 
emplified ; and the Palaeontologist has come as thoroughly 
to know the creatures, in consequence, under their various 
changes from youth to age, as if they had been his contem- 
poraries, and had groA^m up under his eye. And had our 
existing species, vegetable and animal, been derived from 
other species of the earlier periods, it would have been 
equally possible to demonstrate, by a series of specimens, 
their relationship. Let us again instance the British shells. 
Losing certain species in each of the older and yet older 
deposits at which we successively arrive, we at length 
reach the Red and Coraline Crags, where we find, mmgled 
with the familiar forms, a large per centage of forms now 
extinct ; then going on to the shells of the lower Miocene, 
more than six hundred species appear, almost all of which 
are strange to us ; and then, passing to the Eocene shells 
of the Calcaire grassier^ we find ourselves among well nigh 
as large a group of yet other and older strangers, not one 
of which we are able to identify with any shell now living 
in the British area. There would be thus no lack of 
materials for forming such a genealogy of the British 
shells, had they been gradually developed out of the ex- 
tinct species, as that which M. Barrande has formed of tlie 
trilobites. But no such genealogy can be formed. "We 
cannot link on a smgle recent shell to a single extinct one. 
C}j> to a certain point we find the recent shells exhibiting 
all their present specific peculiarities, and beyond that point 
they cease to appear. Down to a certain point the extinct 
shells also exhibit all their specific peculiarities, and then 
they disappear forever. There are no mtermediate species, 



220 GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS 

— no connecting links, — no such connected series of speci- 
mens to be found as enables us to trace a trilobite through 
all its metamorphoses from youth to age. All geologic 
history is full of the begmnings and the ends of species, — 
of their first and their last days ; but it exhibits no geneal- 
ogies of development. . ^ The Lamarckian sets himself to 
grapple, in his dream, with the history of all creation : we 
awaken him, and ask him to grapple, instead, mth the 
history of but a few individual species, — with that of the 
mussel or the whelk, the clam or the oyster ; and we find 
from his helpless ignorance and incapacity what a mere 
pretender he is. 

But while no hypothesis of development can neutralize 
or explain away the great geologic fact, that every true 
species had a beginning independently, apparently, of every 
preceding species, there was demonstrably a general prog- 
ress, in the course of creation, from lower to higher 
forms, which seems scarce less fraught with important 
consequences to the natural theologian than this fact of 
beginning itself For while the one fact effectually dis- 
poses of the "infinite series" of the atheist, the other fact 
disposes scarce less effectually of those reasonings on the 
skeptical side which, framed on the assumption that creation 
is a "singular effect," — an effect without duplicate, — haA^e 
been employed in urging, that from that one effect only 
can we know aught regarding the producing cause. Know- 
ing of the cause from but the effect, and having experience 
of but one effect, we cannot rationally hold, it has been 
argued, that the producing cause could have originated 
effects of a higher or more perfect kind. The creation 
which it produced we know ; but, having no other measure 
of its power, we cannot regard it, it has been contended, as 
equal to the production of a better 'or nobler creation, or 
of course hold that it could orio-inate such a state of things 



ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 221 

as that perfect future state which faith delights to contem- 
plate. It has been well said of the author of this ingenious 
argument, — by far the most sagacious of the skeptics, — 
that if we admit his premises we shall find it difficult indeed 
to set aside his conclusions. And how, in this case, does 
geology deal with his premises ? By opening to us the 
history of the remote past of our planet, and introducing 
us, through the present, to former creations, it breaks 
down that singularity of effect on which he built, and for 
one creation gives us many. It gives us exactly that 
which, as he truly argued, his contemporaries had not, — 
an experience in creations. And let us mark how, applied 
to each of these in succession, his argument would tell. 
. There was a time when life, animal or vegetable, did 
not exist on our planet, and when all creation, from its 
centre to its circumference, was but a creation of dead 
matter. "What, in that early age, would have been the 
effect of the argument of Hume? Simply this, — that 
though the producing Cause of all that appeared was 
competent to the formation of gases and earths, metals 
and minerals, it would be unphilosophic to deem him 
adequate to the origination of a single plant or animal, 
even to that of a spore or of a monad. Ages pass by, and 
the Palaeozoic creation is ushered in, with its tall araucarians 
and pines, its highly organized fishes, and its reptiles of 
comparatively low standing. And how now, and with 
what effect, does the argument apply ? It is now rendered 
evident, that in the earlier creation the producing Cause 
had exerted but a portion of his power, and that he could 
have done greatly more than he actually did, seeing that 
we now find him adequate to the origination of vitality and 
organization in its two great kingdoms, plant and animal. 
But, still confining ourselves with cautious skepticism within 
the limits of our argument, we continue to hold that, as 
19* 



222 GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS 

fishes of a high and reptiles of a low order, with trees of 
the cone-bearing family, are the most perfect specimens of 
their respective classes which the producing Cause has 
originated, it would be rash to hold, in the absence of 
proof, that he could originate aught higher or more 
perfect. And now, as yet other ages pass away, the 
creation of the great Secondary division takes the place of 
that of the vanished Palaeozoic; and we find in its few 
dicotyledonous plants, in its reptiles of highest standing, in 
its great birds, and in its some two or three humble mar- 
supial mammals, that in the previous, as in the earlier 
creation, the producing Cause had been, if I may so express 
myself, working greatly under his strength, and that in this 
third creation we have a still higher display of his potency. 
With some misgivings, however, we again apply our argu- 
ment. And now yet another creation, — that of the Ter- 
tiary period, with its noble forests of dicotyledonous trees 
and its sagacious and gigantic mammals, — rises uj^on the 
scene ; and as our experience in creations has now become 
very considerable, and as we have seen each in succession 
higher than that which preceded it, we find that, notwith- 
standing our assumed skepticism, we had, compelled by 
one of the most deeply seated instincts of our nature, been 
secretly anticipating the advance which the new state of 
things actually realizes. But applying the argument once 
more, we at least assume to hold, that as the sagacious 
elephant is the highest example of animal life yet produced 
by the originating Cause, it would be unphilosophic to 
deem him capable of producing a higher example. And, 
while we are thus reasoning, man appears upon creation, — 
a creature immeasurably superior to all the others, and 
whose very nature it is to make use of his experience of 
the past for his guidance in the future. And if that only 
be solid experience or just reasoning which enables us truly 



ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 223 

to anticipate the events which are to come, and so to make 
provision for them ; and if that experience be not solid, 
and that reasoning not just, which would serve but to 
darken our discernment, and prevent us fi'om correctly 
predicating the cast and complexion of coming events ; 
what ought to be our decision regarding an argument 
which, had it been employed in each of the vanished 
creations of the past, would have had but the effect of 
arresting all just anticipation regarding the immediately 
succeeding creation, and which, thus reversing the main 
end and object of philosophy, would render the philoso- 
pher who clung to it less sagacious in divining the future 
than even the ordinary man ? But, in truth, the existing 
premises, wholly altered by geologic science, are no longer 
those of Hume. The footprint on the sand — to refer to 
his happy illustration — does not now stand alone. Instead 
of one, we see many footprints, each in turn in advance of 
the print behind it, and on a higher level ; and, founding 
at once on an acquaintance with the past, extended 
throughout all the periods of the geologist, and on that 
instinct of our nature whose pecuhar function it is to 
anticipate at least one creation more, we must regard the 
expectation of "new heavens and a new earth, wherein 
dwelleth righteousness," as not unphilosophic, but as, 
on the contrary, altogether rational and according to 
experience. 

Such is the bearing of geological science on two of the 
most important questions that have yet been raised in the 
field of natural theology. Kor does it bear much less 
directly on a controversy to which, during the earlier half 
of the last century, there was no little importance attached 
in Britain, and which engaged on its opposite sides some of 
the finest and most vigorous intellects of the age and 
country. 



224 GEOLOGY IX ITS BEARINGS 

The school of infidelity represented by Bolingbroke, and, 
in :it least his earlier writings, by Soame Jenyns, and which, 
in a modified form, attained to much popularity througli 
Pope's famous "Essay," assigned to man a comparatively 
inconsiderable space in the system of the universe. It 
regarded him as but a single link in a chain of mutual de- 
pendency, — a chain which would be no longer an entire, 
but a broken one, were he to be struck out of it, but as 
tlius more important from his position than from his nature 
or his powers. You will remember that one of the sections 
of Pope's first epistle to his "good St. John" is avowedly 
devoted to show Avhat he terms the " absurdity of man's 
supposing himself the final cause of the creation;" and 
though this great master of condensed meaning and bril- 
liant point is now less read than he Avas in the days of our 
grandfathers, you will all remember the elegant stanzas in 
which he states the usual claims of the species only to ridi- 
cule them. It is human pride personified that he represents 
as exclaiming, — 

" For me kind Nature wakes her genial power, 
Suckles each herb, and spreads out every flower, 
Annual for me the grape, the rose, renew 
The juice nectarious and the balmy dew. 
For me the mine a thousand treasures brings ; 
For me health gushes from a thousand springs ; 
Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me rise; 
My footstool earth, my canopy the skies." 

You will further remember how the poet, after thus reduc- 
ing the claims and lowering the position of the species, set 
himself to show that man, viewed in relation to the place 
which he occupies, ought not to be regarded as an imperfect 
being. Man is, he said, as perfect as he ought to bo. And, 
such being the case, the Author of all, looking, it would 
seem, very little after him, has just left him to take care of 



ON THE TAVO THEOLOGIES. 225 

liimself. A cold, unfeeling abstraction, like the gods of the 
old Ejjicurean, the Great First Cause of this school is a being 

"Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, 
A hero perish or a sparrow fall ; 
Atoms or systems into ruin hurled, 
And now a bubble burst, and now a world/ 

Such, assuredly, was not that God of the Xew Testament 
■whom the Saviour of mankind revealed to his disciples as 
caring for all his creatures of the dust, but as caring most 
for the highest of all. " Are not two sparrows," he said, 
" sold for a farthing ? and one of them shall not fall to the 
ground without your Father. Fear ye not, therefore ; ye 
are of more value than many sj^arrows." . 

It was the error of this ingenious but very unsolid school, 
that it regarded the mere order of the universe as itself an 
end or final cause. It reasoned respecting creation, as if 
it would be true jDhilosophy to account for the origin and 
existence of some great city, such as the city of Washing- 
ton in the United States, built, as we know, for purely 
political purposes, by showing that, — as it was remarkable 
for its order, for the rectilinear directness of its streets, and 
the rectangularity of its squares, — it must have been erected 
simply to be a perfect embodiment of regularity ; and to 
urge further that, save in their character as component parts 
of a perfect whole, the House of Representatives and the 
mansion of the President were of no more intrinsic import- 
ance, or no more decidedly the end of the whole, than any 
low tavern or outhouse in the lesser streets or lanes. The 
destruction of either the outhouse or the House of Repre- 
sentatives would equally form a void in the general plan of 
the city, regarded as an admirably arranged whole. And 
it was thus with the grand scheme of creation ; for, 

" From nature's chain whatever link we strike, 
Tenth or tenth thousand, breaks the chain alike." 



226 GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS 

Kor is it in other than due keeping with such a view of 
creation that its great Author should be represented as a 
cold abstraction, without love or regard, and equally indif- 
ferent to the man and the sparrow, to the atom and the 
planet. Order has respect to but the relations of things or 
of beings, — not to the things or beings themselves ; order 
is the figure which, as mere etched points or strokes, they 
compose, — the legend which, as signs or characters, they 
form ; and who cares anything for the component strokes or 
dots irrespective of the print, or for the component letters 
or words apart from the writing? The "equal eye," in 
such a scheme, would of necessity be an indifferent one. 
Agauist this strange doctrine, though in some measure coun- 
tenanced by the glosses of Warburton in his defence of 
Pope, the theologians protested, — none of them, however, 
more vigorously than Johnson, in his famous critique on the 
"Free Inquiry" of Soame Jenyns. Nor is it uninteresting 
to mark with what a purely instinctive feehng of the right 
some of the better poets, whose "lyre," according to Cow- 
per, was their "heart," protested against it too. Poor Gold- 
smith, when sitting a homeless vagabond on the slopes of the 
Alps, could exclaim in a greatly truer tone than that of his 
pohshed predecessor, — 

"Creation's heir, the world, the world is mine! " 

And in CowiDer himself we find all Goldsmith's intense feel- 
ing of appropriation, that "calls the delightful scenery all 
its own," associated 

" With worthy thoughts of that nnraried love 
That planned, and built, and still upholds, a world 
So clothed with beauty, for rebellious man." 

Strange to say, howcA^er, it is to the higher exponents of 
natural science, and in especial to the geologists, that it has 



ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 227 

been left to deal most directly with the sophistries of 
Bolingbroke and Pope. 

Oken, a man quite as far wrong in some points as either 
the poet or his master, was the first to remark^ and this in 
the oracular, enigmatical style peculiar to the German, that 
" man is the sum total of all the animals." Gifted, as all 
allow, with a peculiarly nice eye for detecting those analo- 
gies which unite the animal world into a harmonious whole, 
he remarked, that in one existence or being all these analo- 
gies converge. Even the humbler students of the heavens 
have learned to find for themselves the star of the pole, by 
following the direction indicated by what are termed the 
two pointer stars in the Great Bear. And to the eye of 
Oken all the groups of the animal kingdom formed a sphere 
of constellations, each of which has its pointer stars, if I 
may so sj^eak, turned towards man. Man occupies, as it 
were, the central point in the great circle of being ; so that 
those lines which pass singly through each of the inferior 
animals stationed at its circumference, meet in him ; and 
thus, as the focus in which the scattered rays unite, he im- 
parts by his presence a unity and completeness to creation 
which it would not possess were he away. You will be 
startled, however, by the language in which the German 
embodies his view ; though it may be not uninstructive to 
refer to it in evidence of the fact that a man may be intel- 
lectually on the very verge of truth, and yet for every moral 
purpose infinitely removed from it. " Man," he says, " is 
God manifest in the flesh." And yet it may be admitted 
that there is a certain loose sense in which man is " God 
manifest in the flesh." As may be afterwards shown, he is 
God's image manifested in the flesh ; and an image or like- 
ness is a manifestation or making evident of that which it 
represents, whether it be an image or likeness of body or 
of mind. 



228 GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS 

Not less extraordinary, but greatly more sound in their 
application, are the views of Professor Owen, — supreme in 
his own special walk as a comparative anatomist. We find 
him recognizing man as exempliiying in his structure the 
perfection of that type in which, from the earhest ages, 
nature had been working with reference to some future 
development, and as therefore a foreordained existence. 
" The recognition of an ideal exemplar for the vertebrated 
animals proves," he says, " that the knowledge of such a 
being as man must h"ave existed before man appeared. For 
the Divine mind that planned the archetype also foreknew 
all its modifications. The archetypal idea was manifested 
in the flesh under divers modifications, upon this planet, 
long prior to the existence of those animal species that 
actually exemplify it." So far Owen. And not less won- 
derful is the conclusion at w^hich Agassiz has arrived, after a 
survey of the geologic existences, more extended and minute, 
in at least tlie ichthyic department, than that of any other 
man. " It is evident," we find him saying, in the conclusion 
of his recent work, " The Principles of Zoology," * " that 
there is a manifest progress in the succession of beings on 
the surface of the earth. This progress consists in an 
increasing similarity to the living fauna, and among the ver- 
tebrates, especially in their increasing resemblance to man. 
But this connection is not the consequence of a direct 
lineage betAveen the faunas of different ages. There is 
nothing like parental descent connecting them. The fishes 
of the Palaeozoic age are in no respect the ancestors of the 
reptiles of the Secondary age, nor does man descend fi-om 

^ Principles of Zoology : touching the Structure, Development, 
Distribution, and Natural Arrangement of the Races of Animals, living 
and extinct. With numerous Illustrations, For the Use of Schools and 
Colleges. Part I., " Comparative Physiology." By Louis Agassiz and 
Augustus A. Gould. Boston: Gould & Lincoln. 



ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 229 

the mammals which preceded him in the Tertiary age. The 
link by which they are connected is of a higher and imma- 
terial nature ; and their connection is to be sought in the 
view of the Creator himself^ whose aim in forming the earth, 
in allowing it to undergo the successive changes which 
geology has jDointed out, and in creating successively all 
the different types of animals which have passed away, was 
to introduce man upon the surface of our globe. Man is 

THE END TOWAEDS WHICH ALL THE ANIMAL CREATION HAS 
TENDED FROM THE FIRST APPEARANCE OF THE FIRST PALAEO- 
ZOIC FISHES." These, surely, are extraordinary deductions. 
" In thy book," says the Psalmist, " all my members were 
written, which in continuance were fashioned when as yet 
there was none of them." And here is natural science, by 
the ^'oice of two of its most distinguished professors, saying 
exactly the same thing. 

Of the earliest knowm vertebrates, — the placoidal fishes 
of the Upper Silurian rocks, — we possess only fragments, 
which, however, sufficiently indicate, from their resem- 
blance to the corresponding parts of an existing shark, — 
the cestracion, — that they belonged to fishes furnished 
with the two pairs of fins now so generally recognized as 
the homologues of the fore and hinder limbs in quadrupeds. 
With the second earliest vertebrates, — the ganoids of the 
Old Red Sandstone, — Ave are more directly acquainted, 
and know that they exhibited the true typical form, — a 
vertebral column terminating in a brain-protecting skull; 
and that, in at least the acanth, celacanth, and dipterian 
families, they had the limb-like fins. In the upper parts of 
the system the earliest reptiles leave the first known traces 
of the tjT^ical foot, ydth. its five digits. Higher still in one 
of the deposits of the Trias we are startled by what seems 
to be the impression of a human hand of an uncouth 
massive shape, but with the thumb apparently set in oppo- 
20 



230 GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS 

sition, as in man, to the other fingers ; we next trace the 
type upwards among the wonderfully developed reptiles of 
the Secondary periods ; then among the mammals of the 
Tertiary ages, higher and yet higher forms appear; the 
mute prophecies of the coming being become with each 
approach clearer, fuller, more expressive, and at length 
receive their fulfilment in the advent of man. A double 
meaning attaches to the term type ; and hence some am- 
biguity in the writings which have appeared on this curious 
subject. Type means a prophecy embodied in symbol; it 
means also what Sir Joshua Reynolds well terms " one of 
the general forms of nature," — a pattern form, from which 
all others in the same class or family, however numerous, 
are recognized as mere exceptions and aberrations. But in 
the geologic series both meanings converge and become 
one. The form or number typical as the general form or 
number, is found typical also as a prophecy of the form 
or number that came at length to be exemj^lified in the 
deputed lord of creation. Let us in our examples take 
typical numbers, as more easily illustrated without diagrams 
than typical forms. 

There are vertebrate animals of the second age of ichthyic 
existence, that, like the Pterichthys and Coccosteus^ were 
furnished with but two limbs. The murrenidoe of recent 
times have no more ; at least one of their number, the 
muraina j)roper, wants limbs altogether ; so also do the 
lampreys. The snakes are equally limbless, save that the 
boas and pythons possess the rudiments of a single paii* ; 
and such also is the condition, among the amphibia, of all 
the known species of Coecilia. And yet, notwithstanding 
these exceptional cases, the true typical number of limbs, 
as shown by a preponderating majority of the vertebrates 
of nil arres of the world, is four, Aixl this typical number 
is the human number. There is as certainly a t}^ical num- 



ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 231 

ber of digits too, as of the limbs which bear them. The 
exceptions are many. All the species of the horse genus 
possess but a smgle digit ; the cattle family possess but two 
digits, the rhinoceros three digits, the hippopotamus four 
digits ; many animals, such as the dog and cat, have but 
four digits on one pair of limbs and five on the other; 
whereas in some of the fishes the number of digits is 
singularly great, — from ten to twenty in most species, and 
in the rays from eighty to a hundred. And yet, as shown 
in the rocks, in which, however, the aberrations appear 
early, the true typical number is five on both the fore and 
hinder limbs. And such is the number in man. There is 
also, in at least the mammalia, a typical number of vertebrae 
in the neck. The three-toed sloth has nine cervical verte- 
brae ; the manati only six ; but seven is the typical number. 
And seven is the himian number also. Man, in short, is 
pre-eminently what a theologian would term the ante- 
typical existence, — the being in whom the types meet and 
are fulfilled. And not only do typical forms and numbers 
of the exemplified character meet in man, but there are not 
a few parts of his framework which in the inferior animals 
exist as but mere sjonbols, of as little importance as dugs 
in the male animal, though they acquire significancy and 
use in him. Such, for instance, are the many-jointed but 
moveless and unnecessary bones of which the stiff inflexible 
fill of the dugong and the fore paw of the mole consist, 
and which exist in his arm as essential portions, none of 
which could be wanted, of an exquisitely flexible instru- 
ment. In other cases, the old types are exemplified serially 
in the growth and development of certain portions of his 
frame. Such is specially the case with that all important 
portion of it, the organ of thought and feeling. The 
human brain is built up by a Avonderful process, during 
which it assumes in succession the form of the brain of a 



232 GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS 

fish, of a reptile, of a bird, of a mammiferous quadnipcd ; 
and, finally, it takes upon it its unique character as a human 
brain. Hence the remark of Oken, that "man is the sum 
total of all the animals;" hence, too, a recognition of type 
in the history of the successive vertebral periods of the 
geologist, symbolical of the history of every indiAidual 
man. It is not difficult to conceive how, on a subject of 
such complexity, especially if approached in an irreverent 
spirit, grave mistakes and misconceptions should take place. 
Virgil knew just enough of Hebrew prophecy to misa})ply, 
in his Pollio^ to his great patron Octavius, those ancient 
predictions which foretold that in that age the Messiah was 
to appear. And I am inclined to hold, that in the more 
ingenious speculations of the Lamarckians we have just a 
similar misapplication of what, emboldened by the vicAvs 
of Owen and Agassiz, I shall venture to term the Geologic 
Prophecies. 

The term is new, but the idea which it embodies, though 
it at first existed rather as a nice poetic instinct than as a 
scientifically based thought, is at least as old as the times 
of Herder and Coleridge. In a passage quoted from the 
former writer by Dr. M'Cosh, in his very masterly work 
on typical forms, I find the profound German remarking of 
the strange resemblances which pervade all nature, and 
impart a general unity to its forms, that it would seem " as 
if on all our earth the form-abounding mother had proposed 
to herself but one type, — one proto-plasma, — according 
to which, and for which, she formed them all. Know, 
then," he continues, " what this form is. It is the identical 
one which man also wears." And the remark of Coleridge, 
in his " Aids to Reflection," is still more definite. " Let us 
carry us back in spirit," he says, " to the mysterious week, 
the teeming work days of the Creator (as they rose in 
VISION hefore the eye of the inspired historian) of the 



02^ THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 233 

operations of the heavens and of the earth, in the day that 
the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. And who 
that watched their vrays with an understanding heart could, 
as the vision evolved still advanced towards him, contem- 
plate the filial and loyal bee, the home-building, wedded, 
and divorcelcss swallow, and, above all, the manifoldly 
intelligent ant tribes, with their commonwealths and con- 
federacies, their warriors and miners, the husband folk that 
fold in their tiny flocks on the honey leaf, and the virgin 
sister with the holy instincts of maternal love detached and 
in selfless purity, and not say in himself, Behold the shadow 
of approaching humanity, the sun rising from behind in the 
kindling morn of creation ? " There is fancy here ; but it 
is that sagacious fancy, vouchsafed to only the true poet, 
which has so often proved the pioneer of scientific dis- 
covery, and which is in reality more sober and truthful, in 
the midst of its apparent extravagance, than the gravest 
cogitations of ordinary men. It is surely no incredible 
thing, that He who, in the dispensations of the human 
period, spake by type and symbol, and who, when He 
walked the earth in the flesh, taught in parable and 
allegory, should have also spoken in the geologic ages 
by prophetic figures embodied in the form and structure 
of animals. Nay, what the poet imagined, though in a 
somewhat extreme form, the philosophers seem to be on 
the very eve of confirming. The foreknown "archetypal 
idea" of Owen, — "the immaterial link of connection" of 
all the past mth all the present, which Agassiz resolves 
into the foreordained design of the Creator, — will be yet 
found, I cannot doubt, to translate themselves into one 
great general truth, namely, that the Palaeozoic, Secondary, 
and Tertiary dispensations of creation w^ere charged, like 
the patriarchal and Mosaic dispensations of grace, with the 
20* 



234 GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS 

" sll^dows of better things to come." The advent of man 
simply as such was the great event perfigured during the 
old geologic ages. The advent of that Divine Man " who 
hath abohshed death, and brought life and immortaUty to 
. light," was the great event prefigured during the historic 
: ages. It is these two grand events, equally portions of one 
sublime scheme, originated when God took counsel with 
himself in the depths of eternity, that bind together past, 
present, and future, — the geologic with the Patriarchal, 
the Mosaic, and the Christian ages, and all together with 
that new heavens and new earth, the last of many creations, 
in which there shall be " no more death nor curse, but the . 
throne of God and the Lamb shall be in it, and his servants 
shall serve him." 

"There is absurdity," said Pope, "in man's conceiting 
himself the final cause of creation." Unless, however, 
man had the entire scheme of creation before him, with 
the further partially known scheme of which but a part, 
constitutes the grand theme of revelation, how could he 
pronounce on the absurdity? The knowledge of the 
geologist ascends no higher than man. He sees all nature 
in the pre-Adamic past, pointing with prophetic finger 
towards him; and on even the argument of Hume, — 
just and sohd within its proper Umits, — he refuses to 
ac<:juiesce in the unfounded inference of Pope. In order 
to prove the absurdity of " man's conceiting himself the 
final cause of creation," proof of an ulterior cause, — of 
a higher end and aim, — must be adduced ; and of aught 
higher than man, the geologist, aa such, knows nothing. 
The long vista opened up by his science closes with the 
deputed lord of creation, — with man as he at present 
exists ; and when, casting himself full upon revelation, the 
vail is drawn aside, and an infinitely grander vista stretches 



I 



ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 235 

out before him into the future, he sees man — no longer, 
however, the natural, but the Divine man — occupying 
what is at once its terminal point and its highest apex. 
Such are some of the bearings of geologic science on 
the science of natural theology. Geology has disposed 
effectually and forever of the oft-urged assumption of an 
infinite series; it deals as no other science could have 
dealt with the assertion of the skeptic, that creation is a 
" singular effect ; " it casts a flood of unexpected light on 
the somewhat obsolete plausibilities of Bolingbroke and 
Jenyns, that exhibits their utterly unsolid character; yet 
further, it exhibits in a new aspect the argument founded 
on design, and invests the place and standing of man in 
creation with a peculiar significancy and importance, from 
its relation to the iuture. But on this latter part of my 
subject — necessarily of considerable extent and multiplicity, 
and connected rather with revealed than with natural 
religion — I must not now expatiate, I shall, however, 
attempt laying before you, on some future evening, a few 
thoughts on this portion of the general question, which 
you may at least find suggestive of others, and which, 
if they fail to elicit new truths, may have the eflect of 
opening up upon an old truth or two a few fresh avenues 
through which to survey them. The character of man 
as a fellow-worker with his Creator in the material province 
has still to be considered in the light of geology. Man 
was the first, and is still the only creature of whom we 
know anything, who has set himself to carry on and 
improve the work of the world's original framer, — who 
is a planter of woods, a tiller of fields, and a keeper of 
gardens, — and who carries on his work of mechanical 
contrivance on obviously the same principles as those on 
which the Divine designer wrought of old, and on which 



236 GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS, ETC. 

he works still. It may not be wholly unprofitable to 
acquaint ourselves, through evidence furnished by the 
rocks, with the remarkable fact, that the Creator imparted 
to man the Divine image before he united to man's the 
Divine nature. 



. I 



LECTURE SIXTH. 

GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 
PAKT II. 

Up till the introduction of man upon our planet, the 
humbler creatures, his predecessors, formed but mere 
figures in its various landscapes, and failed to alter or 
affect by their works the face of nature. They were 
conspicuous, not from what they did^ but from what they 
were. At a very early period reefs of coral, the work of 
minute zooj)hytes, whitened the shallows of the ocean, 
or encircled with pale, ever broadening frames, solitary 
islands green with the shrubs and trees of extinct floras; 
but, though products of the animal world, they were not 
built up under the direction of even an instinctive intelli- 
gence, but were as entirely the results of a vegetative 
process of mere growth as the forests or reed brakes of 
the old Carboniferous savannahs. At a later time an ant 
hill might be here and there descried, rearing its squat, 
brown pyramid amid the recesses of some Oolitic forest ; 
or, in a period still more recent, the dam of the gigantic 
beaver might be seen extending its minute eye-like circlet 
of blue amid the windings of some bosky ravine of the 
Pliocene age; or existing as a little mound-skirted pond, 
with the rude half-submerged cottage of the creature, its 
architect, rising beside it, on some rivulet of the Pleisto- 
cene. But how inconsiderable such works, compared with 
the wide extent of prospect in which they were included 1 



238 GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS 

How entirely inconspicuous rather, save when placed in 
the immediate foreground of the pictures into whose 
composition they entered! Not until the introduction 
of man upon earth do we find a creature whose works 
sensibly afiect and modify the aspects of nature. But 
when man appears, how mighty the change which he 
effects! Immediaterly on his creation he takes under his 
care the vegetable productions of use and show : it becomes 
his business to keep and dress a garden. He next becomes 
a tiller of fields, then a planter of vineyards : here he cuts 
down great forests ; there he rears extensive woods. He 
makes himself places of habitation ; and busy cities spring 
up as the trophies of his dihgence and skill. His labors, 
as they grow upon the waste, affect the appearance of vast 
continents ; until at length, from many a hill-top and tall 
spire, scarce a rood of ground can be seen on which he has 
not built, or sown, or planted, or around which he has not 
erected his walls or reared his hedges. Man, in this great 
department of industry, is what none of his predecessors 
upon the earth ever were, — "a fellow-worker" with 
the Creator. He is a mighty improver of creation. We 
recognize that as improvement which adapts nature more 
thoroughly to man's own necessities and wants, and renders 
it more pleasing both to his sense of the aesthetic and to his 
more material senses also. He adds to the beauty of the 
flowers which he takes under his charge, — to the delicacy 
and fertility of the fruits; the seeds of the wild grasses 
become corn beneath his care ; the green herbs grow great 
of root or bulb, or bulky and succulent of top and leaf; 
the wild produce of nature sports under his hand ; the rose 
and lily broaden their disks and multiply their petals ; the 
harsh green crab swells out into a dehcious golden-rinded 
apple, streaked with crimson; the productions of his 
kitchen garden, strangely metamorphosed to serve the 



ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 239 

uses of his table, bear forms unknown to nature ; an oocult 
law of change and development mherent to these organ- 
isms meets hi hhn with the developing instinct and ability, 
and they are regenerated under his surveillance. Xor is 
his influence over many of the animals less marked. The 
habits which he imparts to the parents become nature^ in 
his behalf, in their offspring. The dog acquires, under his 
tutelage, the virtues of fidelity to a master and aifection to 
a friend. The ox and horse learn to assist him in the 
labors of the fields. The udders of the cow and goat 
distend beneath his care far beyond the size necessary in 
the wild state, and supply him with rich milk, and the 
other various products of the dairy. The fleece of the 
sheep becomes finer of texture and longer of fibre in his 
pens and folds; and even the indocile silkAvorm spins, in 
his sheltered conservatories, and among the mulberry trees 
which he has planted, a larger, and brighter, and more 
glistening coceon. Man is the great creature-worker of 
the world, — its one created being, that, taking up the 
work of the adorable Creator, carries it on to higher 
results and nobler developments, and finds a field for his 
persevering ingenuity and skill in every province in which 
his Maker had expatiated before him. He is evidently — 
to adopt and modify the remark of Oken — God's image 
" manifest in the flesh." 

Surveyed from the special point of view furnished by this 
peculiar nature of man, unique in creation, all the past of 
our planet divides into two periods; — the period, inclusive 
of every age known to the geologist, during which only the 
Creator wi'ought ; and the period during which man has 
wrought, and to which all human history belongs. In such 
a view we are presented with two sets of Avorks, — those 
of the Creator-worker, and those of the creature-worker ; 
and the vast fund of materials on which the natural theo- 



210 GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS 

logian frames his arguments demonstrative of design or 
contrivance, assumes a new significancy and interest when 
employed as evidence that there exists a certain correspond- 
ence of nature and intellect between the two workers, 
human and Divine. The ability of accomplishing the same 
ends by the same means, — in other words, of thinking and 
acting in the same practical tract, — indicates a similarity, 
if not identity, of intellectual nature. In the Chinese centre 
of civilization, for instance^ printing, gunpowder, the mari- 
ner's compass, with the various chemical and mechanical 
arts of elegant life, were originated without concert with 
the European centre of civilization, simply because in China, 
as in Europe, the same human faculties, prompted by the 
same tastes and necessities, had expatiated in the same 
tracts of invention, and had, as a consequence, educed the 
same results. I was much struck, when spending half an 
hour in a museum illustrative of the arts in China, by the 
identity of these with our own, especially in the purely 
mechanical departments; and again, when similarly em- 
ployed in that apartment devoted, in the British Museum, 
to the domestic utensils of the ancient Egyptians. The 
identity of the more common contrivances which I wit- 
nessed, with familiar contrivances in our own country, I 
regarded as altogether as conclusive of an identity of mind 
in the individuals who had originated them, as if I had 
actually seen human creatures at work on them all. One 
class of productions showed me that the potter's wheel and 
the turning lathe had been known and employed as cer- 
tainly in China and ancient Egypt as in Britain. Another, 
,that their weaving processes must have been nearly the 
same. The Chinese know, for instance, as well as ourselves, 
that patterns can be delicately brought out, — as in the 
damasks, — without the assistance of color, simply by expos- 
ing silken or flaxen fibre at different angles to the light ; 



ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 241 

and lliey have fallen, as their work shows, on the right 
methods of producing it. And the Egyptians anticipated 
Uo in even our most homely household contrivances. They 
even fermented their bread and trussed their fowls after the 
same fashion; and thus gave evidence, in these familiar 
matters, that they thought and contrived "after the manner 
of men." Now, in acquainting myself with the organisms 
of the geologic periods, I have been similarly but more 
deeply impressed by what I must be jDermitted to term the 
human cast and character of the contrivances which they 
exemplified. Not only could I understand the principles on 
which they were constructed, but further, not a few of them 
had, I found, been actually introduced into works of human 
invention ages ere they Avere discovered in the rock. What 
the great Creator-worker had originated in the Palaeozoic 
and Secondary periods, had been in after times originated 
by the little creature-worker, wholly unaware that his con- 
trivance had been anticipated, and was but a repetition of 
a previously executed design. In the later geologic ages 
the organization of the various extinct animals so nearly 
resembled that of the animals Avhich still live, that we may 
regard it as not inadequately represented by the illustrations 
of Paley. A few such excej^tional contrivances appear 
among the mammals of the Tertiary as that formed by the 
huge pickaxe-like tusks of the Dinotherium, or a few such 
extraordinary modifications of the ordinary mammalian 
framework as that exhibited in the enormously massive pel- 
xiQ arches and hinder Umbs of the Mylodon and Megathe- 
rium. But not until we pass into the deposits of the Sec- 
ondary period, and get among its cephalopoda, do we find 
a mechanism altogether unlike any with which we are 
acquainted among liA^ing organisms. As admirably sho^vn 
by Buckland, the partitions which separate into chambers 
aU the whorls of the ammonite except the outermost one, 
21 



242 



GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS 



were exquisitely adapted to strengtheD, by the tortuous 
windings of their outer edges, a shell which had to combine 
great Hghtness with great powers of resistance. Itself a 
continuous arch throughout, it was supported by a series of 
continuous arches inside, somewhat resembling in form the 
groined ribs of the Gothic roof, but which, unlike the pon- 
derous stone work of the mediaeval architects, were as light 
as they were strong. And to this combination of arches 
there was added, in the ribs and grooves of the sheU, yet 
another element of strength, — that which has of late been 
introduced into iron roofs, which, by means of their corru- 
gations, — ribs and grooves like those of the ammonite, — 
are made to span over wide spaces, without the support of 
beams or rafters. Still more recently, the same principle 
has been introduced into metallic boats, which, when corru- 

Fig. 94. 





AMMONITES HUMPR1ESIANU8. 

{Oolite.) 



gated, like the old ammonites, are found to be sufficiently 
strong to resist almost any degree of pressure without the 
wonted addition of an interior fi-amework. Similar evi- 
dences of design appear in the other extinct molluscs pccu- 



ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 



2-43 



liar to these geologic ages, such as tlic liamite and turrilite. 
The belemnite seems to have miited the principle of the 
float to that of the sinker, as we see both united in some of 
our modern life boats, which are steadied on their keel by 
one principle, and preserved from foundering by the other; 
or as we~ find them united by the boy in his mimic smack, 
which he hollows out and decks, in order to render it suffi- 
ciently light, while at the same time he furnishes it with a 
keel of lead, in order to render it sufficiently steady. The 
old articulata abound in marks of ingenious mechanical 
contrivance. The trilobites were covered over back and 



Fig. 95. 



Fig. 96. 





ENCRINITES MONILIFORMIS. 

{Trias.) 



CUPRESSOCRINUS CRASSUS. 

{Old Bed Sandstone.) 



head with the most exquisitely constructed plate armor : 
but as their abdomens seem to have been soft and defence- 
less, they had the ability of coiling themselves round on the 
approach of danger, plate moving on plate with the nicest 



24-1 GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS 

adjustment, till the rim of the armed tail rested on that of 
the armed head, and the creature presented the appearance 
of a ball defended at every point. In some genera, as hi 
Calymene, the tail consisted of jointed segments tih its ter- 
mination ; in others, as in Illgenus, there was a great caudal 
shield, that in size and form corresponded to the shield 
which covered the head ; the segments of Calymene, from 
the flexibility of their joints, fitted close to the cerebral 
rim ; while the same eflect was produced in the inflexible 
shields, caudal and cephalic, of lUaenus, by their exact cor- 
respondence, and the flexibility of the connecting rings, 
which enabled them to fit together like two equal-sized 
cymbals brought into contact at every point by the hand. 
ISTor were the ancient crinoids less remarkable for the amount 
of nice contrivance wliich their structures exhibited, than 
the ancient molhiscs or crustaceans. In their calyx-like 
bodies, consisting always of many parts, we find the princi- 
ple of the arch introdued in almost every possible form and 
modification, and the utmost flexibility secured to their 
stony arms by the amazing number of the pieces of which 
they were composed, and the nice disposition of the joints. 
In the Pentacrinites of the Secondary period (see Fig. 97) 
an immense spread of arms, about a thousand in number, 
and composed of about a hundred thousand separate pieces, 
had all the flexibility, though formed of solid lime, of a 
drift of nets, and yet were so nicely jointed, tooth fitting 
into tooth in all their numerous parts, and the whole so 
bound together by ligament, that, with all the flexibihty, 
they had also all the toughness and tenacity, of pieces of 
thread network. •Human ingenuity, with the same purposes 
to eifect, that is, the sweeping of shoals of swimming 
animals into a central receptacle, would probably construct 
a somewhat similar machine ; but it would take half a life- 
time to execute one equally elaborate. 



ox THE TWO TIILOLOGIES, 



245 



In carefully examining, for purposes of restoration, some 
of the earliest ganoidal fishes, I was not a little impressed 

Fig. 97.* 




PENTACRTNUS FASCICULOSITS. 

(Lias.) 

* a, Articulating surface of joint, b, Fragment of column, exhibiting 
laterally the tooth processes, so fitted into each other as to admit of 
21* 



246 



GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS 



by the peculiar mecliamcal contrivances exhibited in their 
largely developed dermal skeletons. In some cases these 
contrivances were sufficiently simple, resembling those which 
we find exemplified in the humbler trades, originated in 
comparatively mi enlightened ages ; and yet their simplicity 
had but the effect of rendering the peculiarly human cast 
of the mind exhibited in their production all the more 
obAdous. The bony scales which covered fishes such as the 
Osteolepis and Diplopterus of the Old Red Sandstone, or 

Fig. 98. 





a, CHAMFERED SCALES. (OsteolepiS.) 

b, IMBRICATED SCALES. (GlyptolepiS,) 

{Old Hed Sandstone.) 

the Megalichthys of the Coal Measures, were of consider- 
able mass and thickness. They could not, compatibly with 



flexure without risk of dislocation. The uppermost joint shows two 
lateral cavities for the articulation of auxiliary arms. 



OK THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 247 

much nicety of finish, be laid over each other, like the thin 
horny scales of the salmon or herring ; and so we find them 
curiously fitted together, not like slates on a modern roof, 
but like hewn stones on an ancient one. There ran on the 
upper surface of each, along the anterior side and higher 
end, a groove of a depth equal to half the thickness of the 
scale ; and along the posterior side and lower end, on the 
under surface, a sort of bevelled chamfer, which, fitting into 
the grooves of the scales immediately behind and beneath 

Fig. 99. 




SCALE OF nOLOPTTCHIUS GIGANTEUS. 

(Nat. size.) 

(Old Red Sandstone.) 

it, brought their surflices to the same line, and rendered tho 
shining coverings of these strongly armed ganoids as smooth 
and even as those of the most delicately coated fishes of 
the present day. In the scales of the Celacanth family the 
arrangement was difierent. Though exceedingly massive 
in some of the genera, they were imbricated, like those of 



248 



GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS 



the Pangolins ; and were chiefly remarkable for the combi- 
nation of contrivances which they exhibited for securing the 
greatest possible amount of strength from the least possible 
amount of thickness. The scales of Holoptychius giganteus 
may be selected as representative of those of the family to 
which it belonged. It consisted of three plates, or rather, 
like the human skull, of two sohd plates, with a diploe or 
spongy layer between. The outer surface was curiously fret- 
ted into alternate ridges and furrows ; and hence the name 
of the genus, — lorinkled scale ; and these imparted to the 
exterior plate on which they occurred, and which was 
formed of solid bone, the strength which results from a cor- 
rugated or fluted surface. Cromwell, in commissioning a 
friend to send him a helmet, shrewdly stipulated that it 
should be a "fluted pot ;" and we find that the Holoptychius 
had got the principle of the fluted pot exemplified in the 
outer plate of each of its scales, untold ages before. The 
spongy middle plate must, like the diploe of the skull, have 
served to deaden ths vibrations of a blow dealt from the 

Fig. 100. 




SECTION OF SCALE OF HOLOPTYCHIUS. 

(Mag. eight diameters.) 



outside. It was a stratum of sand bags piled up in the mid- 
dle of a plank rampart. Their innermost table was formed, 
like the outer, of solid bone, but had a diflerent arrange- 
ment. It was properly not one, but several tables, in each 



ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 249 

of which the osseous fibres, spread out in the general plane 
of the scale, lay at a diverse angle from those of the table 
immediately in contact ^Wth it. The principle was evidently 
that of the double-woven cloth, or cloth of two incorporated 
layers, such as moleskin^ in which, from the arrangement 
of the threads, what a draper would term the tear of the 
one layer or fold lies at a different angle in the general 
fabric from that of the other. We are thus presented, in a 
single fossil scale little more than the eighth part of an inch 
in thickness, TV'ith three distinct strengthening principles, — 
the principle of Cromwell's "fluted pot," — the principle of 
a rampart lined T\4th plank, and filled with sand bags in the 
centre, — and the principle of the double-woven fabrics of 
the "moleskin" manufacturer.* The contrivances exem- 
plified in the cuirass of the Pterichthys were scarce less 
remarkable. It was formed of bony plates, strongly arched 
above, but comparatively flat beneath ; and along both its 
anterior and posterior rims a sudden thickening of the plates 
formed a massive band, which served to strengthen the 
entire structure, as transverse ribs of stone are found streng- 
thening Gothic vaults of the Norman age. The scale 
covered tail of the creature issued from withm the posterior 
run, which formed around it a complete though iiTCgular 
ring, arched above and depressed beneath; whereas the 
anterior rim, to which the head was attached, was incom- 
plete when separated from it. It was, in its detached state, 
an arch wanting the keystone. A keystone, however, pro^ 
jected outwards from the occipital plate of the head ; and, 



* Perhaps one strengthening principle more might be enumerated as 
occurring in this curious piece of mechanism. In the layers of the nether 
plate, the fibres, instead of being laid in parallel lines, like the threatls in 
the moleskin of my illustration, seem to be felted together,— an arrange- 
ment which must have added considerably to their coherency and powers 
of resistance. 



250 GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS 

as it had to form at once the bond of connection between 
the cerebral armature of the creature and its cuirass, and to 
complete the arch formed by the strengthening belt or rib 
of the latter, it curiously combined the principle of both 
the dovetail of the carpenter and the keystone of the mason. 
Viewed from above, it was a dovetail, forming a strong 
attachment of the head to the body ; viewed in the trans- 
verse section, it was an efficient keystone, that gave solidity 
and strength to the arched belt or rib. Both keystone 
and dovetail are comparatively simple contrivances ; but I 
know not that they have been united in the same piece, save 
in the very ancient instance ftirnished by the strong bony 
plate which connected the helmet of the Pterichthys with 
its cuirass. 

A brief anecdote, yet further illustrative of the frame- 
work of this ancient ganoid, may throw some additional 
light on what I have ventured to term the human cast 
of the contrivances exhibited in the organisms of the old 
geologic ages. After carefully examining many specimens, 
I published a restoration of both the upper and under side 
of Pterichthys fully fifteen years ago. The greatest of 
living ichthyologists, however, misled by a series of speci- 
mens much less complete than mine, difiered from me in 
my conclusions; and what I had represented as the 
creature's under or abdominal side, he represented as its 
upper or dorsal side; while its actual upper side he 
regarded as belonging to another, though closely allied, 
genus. I had no opportunity, as he resided on the Con- 
tinent at the time, of submitting to him the specimens on 
which I had founded; though, at once certain of his 
thorough candor and love of truth, and of the solidity of 
my data, I felt confident that, in order to alter his decision, 
it was but necessary that I should submit to him my 
^vi'lence. Meanwhile, however, the case was regarded as 



ON THi: TWO THEOLOGIES. 251 

settled against me ; and I found at least one popular and 
very ingenious writer on geology, after referring to my 
description of the Pterichthys, going on to say that, 
though graphic, it was not correct, and that he himself 
could describe it at least more truthfully, if not more 
vividly, than I had done. And then there followed a 
description identical with that by which mme had been 
supplanted. Five years bad passed, when one day our 
greatest British authority on fossil fishes. Sir Philip Eger- 
ton, was struck, when passing an hour among the ichthyic 
organisms of his princely collection, by the appearance 
presented by a central plate in ^ the cuirass of the Pterich- 
thys. It is of a lozenge form, and, occupying exactly such 
a place in the nether armature of the creature as that 
occupied by the lozenge shaped spot on the ace of dia- 
monds, it comes in contact with four other plates that lie 
around it, and represent, so to speak, the white portions 
of the card. And Sir Philip now found, that instead of 
lying over, it lay under, the four contiguous plates : they 
overlapped it, instead of being overlapped by it. This, he 
at once said, on ascertaining the fact, cannot be the upper 
side of the Pterichthys. A plate so arranged would have 
formed no proper protection to the exposed dorsal surface 
of the creature's body, as a slight blow would have at 
once sent it in upon the interior framework ; but a proper 
enough one to the under side of a heavy swimmer, that, 
like the flat fishes, kept close to the bottom ; — a character 
which, as shown by the massive bulk of its body, and its 
small spread of fin, must have belonged to the Pterichthys. 
Sir Philip followed up his observations on the central 
plate by a minute examination of the other parts of the 
creature's armature ; and the survey terminated in a recog- 
nition of the earlier restoration, — set aside so long before, 
• — as vutually the true one ; — a recognition in which 



252 GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS 

Agassiz, when made acquainted with the nature of the 
evidence, at once acquiesced. Now, here was there a 
question which had been raised regarding the true mech- 
anism of one of the oldest ganoidal fishes, and settled 
erroneously on wrong data, again opened up, to be settled 
anew on one of the most obvious mechanical principles 
exemplified in the simple art of the slater or tiler. The 
argument of Sir Philip amoimted simply to this : — If the 
accepted restoration be a true one, then the Creator of 
the Pterichthys must have committed a mistake in me- 
chanics which an ordinary slater would have avoided; 
but as the Creator commits no such blunders, the mistake 
probably occurs in but the restoration. I may mention, 
that the dorsal surface of this ancient fish had also its 
central plate, — a lozenge truncated at its two longer ends ; 
and that, moulded to meet the necessities of its position, it 
was not flat, hke the under one, but strongly arched ; and 
that on four of its six sides it overrode by a squamose 
suture the lower plates with which it came in contact. 

These are but humble illustrations of the designing 
principle, as exhibited of old ; and yet they impress none 
the less strongly on that account. Among the many con- 
trivances of the Chinese Museum, to which I have akeady 
referred, none seemed more to excite the curiosity of 
visitors than a set of tall-backed, elaborately carved chairs, 
exceedingly hke those which were used in our own country 
two centuries ago, and which Cowper so exquisitely 
describes. For thousands of nules in the wide tract that 
spreads out between European Christendom and the great 
wall, the inhabitants squat upon mats or carpets, or loll on 
divans; and the contrivance of the chair is unknovtm: it 
reappears in China, however, and reappears, not as a mere 
seat or stool, but as, in every bar and limb, the identical 
chair of Europe arrested a century or two back in its 



ox THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 2j3 

development. And every corresponding tenon and mortise 
exhibited by the Chinese and European examj^les of this 
simple piece of furniture served more forcibly to show an 
identity of character in the minds which had originated 
them in countries so far apart, than the more elaborate 
contrivances which, though illustrative of the same prin- 
ciples of invention, were less easily understood. It is so 
with the more simple and familiar instances of adaptation 
furnished by the works of the Creator. We infer from 
them, more directly than from the complex mechanisms, 
that he who wrought of old after the manner of a man 
must have, in his intellectual character, if I may so express 
myself, certam man-like qualities and traits. In all those 
works on Natural Theology that treat, like the work of 
Paley, on the argument of design, the assumption of a 
certain unity of the intellectual nature of the Creator and 
creature is made, tacitly at least, the basis of all the reason- 
ings; and it is in the cases in which the design is most 
simple that the argument is most generally understood. It 
is in the lower skirts of the Divine nature that we most 
readily trace the resemblance to the nature of man, — an 
effect, mayhap, of the narrow reach of our faculties in their 
present infantile state. 

But the resemblance is not restricted to the constructive 
department. Both in the Chinese collection and among 
the Egyptian antiquities exhibited in the British Museum, 
I found color as certainly as mechanical contrivance. And 
the color furnished not only a practical example from both 
the early and the remote peoples of the same sort of 
chemical science as exists at the present time among 
ourselves in our dyeworks and pigment manufactories, but 
it also showed a certain identity with our own of their 
sense of beauty. The Chinese satins are gorgeous with 
green, blue, yellow, scarlet, crimson, and purple, and have 
22 



254 GEOLOGY IX ITS BEARINGS 

fringes heavy with thread of gold. Gilding is as common 
among this distant i)eople as among ourselves, and at once 
shows a familiarity with the art of the gold beater, and a 
sensibility to the beauty of a golden sm-face ; and in the 
painted ornaments I detected the rich tints of vermilion 
and crimson lake, with the mineral blues, yelloAvs, and 
greens. In the Egyptian department, though the blanch- 
ing influences of three thousand years had dimmed the 
tints and tarnished the metals, I found e^'idence of the 
same regard to hue and lustre as exists still in China and 
among ourselves ; all that now pleases the eye in London 
and Pekin had pleased it in Thebes durmg the times of the 
earlier Pharaohs. And just as we infer from the mechanical 
contrivances of the Creative-AYorker that he possesses a 
certam identity of mind in the constructive department 
with his creature-workers, and this upon the principle on 
which we infer an identity of mind between the creature- 
workers of Chhia, ancient Egypt, and our own coimtry, 
seeing that their works are identical, must we not also 
mfer, on the same prmciple, that he possesses in the mstJietic 
department a certain identity with them also. True, this 
region of the beautiful, ever surrounded by an atmosphere 
of obscure, ill-settled metaphysics, is greatly less clear 
than that mechanical province of whose various machines, 
whether of Divine or human contriA^ance, it can be at least 
affirmed that macMnes they are, and that they effect their 
purposes by contrivances of the same or of resembling 
kinds. And yet the appearance in nature, age after age, 
of the same forms and colors of beauty which man, in 
gratifying his taste for the lovely in shape and hue, is ever 
reproducing for himself, does seem to justify our inference 
of an identity of mind in this province also. The colors 
of tlie old geologic organisms, like those of the paintmgs 
of ancient Egypt, are greatly faded. A few, however, of 



ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES 



255 



the Secondary, and even Palaeozoic shells, still retain the 
rich prismatic hues of the original nacre. Many of the 
Tertiary division still bear the distinctive painted spots. 
Some of the later fossil fishes, when first laid open in the 
rock, exhibit the pearly gleam that must of old have 
lighted up the green depths of the water as they darted 
through. Not a few of the fossil corals preserve enough 
of their former color to impart much delicacy of tint to the 
marbles in which they occur. But it is chiefly in form, not 
in shade or hue, that we find in the organisms of the 
geologic ages examples of that beauty in which man 
delights, and which he is ever reproducing for himself. 
There is scarce an architectural ornailient of the Gothic or 
Grecian styles Avhich may not be found existing as fossils 
in the rocks. The Ulodendron was sculptured into grace- 
fully arranged rows of pointed and closely imbricated 

Kg. 101. 





SIGILLARIA GEOESEBI 

( Coal Measures.) 



leaves, similar to those into which the Roman architects 
fretted the torus of the Corinthian order. The Sigillaria 



256 



GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS 



were fluted columns ornately carved in the line of 1J ^ 
channelled flutes; the Lepidodendra bore, according to 
their ispecies, sculptured scales, or lozenges, or egg-like 
hollows, set in a sort of frame, and relieved into knobs and 
farrows; all of them furnishing examples of a delicate 
diaper work, like that so admired in our more ornate 
Gothic bmldings, such as Westminster Abbey, or Canter- 




WHOELED SHELLS OP THE OLD RED SANDSTONE.* 

bury and Chichester Cathedrals, only greatly more ex- 
quisite in their design and finish The scroll shells, a very. 



* Fi^. 102, Clymenia Sedwicki; Fig. 103, Gyroceras Eifelensis; Fig. 101, 
Ciirus Goldfussii. 



ox THE Tvro theologies. 257 

numerous scctiou of the class in the earlier ages, such as 
Maclurea, Euomi^halus, Clymenia, and the great family of 
the ammonites, were volutes of varying proportions, but 
not less graceful than the ornament of similar proportions 
so frequently introduced into Greek and Roman architec- 
ture, and of which we have such prominent examples in 
the capitals of the Ionic, Corinthian, and composite orders. 
In what is known as the modern Ionic the spiral of the 
volute is not all on one plane ; it is a Euomphalus : in the 
central volutes of the Corinthian the spiral is an open one ; 
it is a Lituite or Gyroceras : in the ancient Ionic it is either 
wholly flat, as in Planorbus or the upper side of Maclurea, 
or slightly relieved, as in the ammonites. There is no form 
of the volute known to the architect which may not be 
found in the rocks, but there are many forms in the rocks 
unknown to the architect. Nor are the spire-hke shells 
(see Fig. 105) less remarkable for the rich and varied style 
of their ornamentation than the whorled ones. They are 
spires, pinnacles, turrets, broaches; ornate, in some in- 
stances, beyond the reach of the architect, and illustrative, 
in almost all, of his happiest forms and proportions. We 
detect among the fossils the germs of numerous designs 
developed in almost every department of art ; but merely 
to enumerate them would require a volume. One form of 
the old classic lamp was that of the nautilus ; another, that 
of Gyphma mcurva ; the zigzag mouldings of the Norman 
Gothic may be found in the carinated oysters of the Green- 
sand; the more delicate frettings of similar form which 
roughened the pillars of a somewhat later age occur on 
Conularia and the dorsal spines of Gyi-acanthus. The old 
corals, too, abound in ornamental patterns, which man, 
unaware of their existence at the time, devised long after 
for himself. In an article on calico printing, wliich forms 
part of a receiTt history of Lancashire, there are a few of , 

DO* 



258 



GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS 



the patterns introduced, backed by tbe recommendation 
that they were the most successful ever tried. Of one of 



Fig. 105. 



Fig, 106. 





MUBCHISONIA BIGRANULOSA. 
(Old Bed Sandstone.) 



CONULAEIA ORNATA. 

(Old Bed Sandstone.) 



these, knoAvn as "Lane's Net," there sold a greater number 
of pieces than of any other pattern ever brought into the 
market. It led to many imitations ; and one of the most 
popular of these answers line for line, save that it is more 
stiff and rectilinear, to the pattern in a recently discovered- 
Old Red Sandstone coral, the Smithia Pe7igellyi. The 
beautifully arranged lines which so smit the dames of 
England, that each had to provide herself with a gown 
of the fabric which they adorned, had been stamped amid 
the rocks eons of ages before. And it must not be forgot- 
ten, that all these forms and shades of beauty which once 
filled all nature, but of which only a few fragments, or a 



ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 



259 



few faded tints, sur\dve, were created, not to gratify man's 
love of the aesthetic, seeing that man had no existence until 



Fig. 107. 



Fig. 108. 




CALICO PATTERN. 

(Manchester.) 



SMITHIA PENGELLTI. 

( Old Bed Sandstone.) 



long after they had disappeared, but in meet harmony with 
the tastes and faculties of the Divine Worker, who had in 
his wisdom produced them all. 

You will, I trust, bear with me should I seek, in depths 
where the light shed by science becomes obscure, to guide 
my steps by light derived fi*om another and wholly different 
source. In an assembly such as that which I have now the 
honor of addressing, there must be many shades of religious 
opinion. I shall, however, assail no man's faith, but simply 
lay before you a few deductions which, founded on my 
own, have supplied me with what I deem a consistent 
theory of the curious class of phenomena with which this 
evening we have been mainly dealing. First, then, I must 
hold that we receive the true explanation of the man-like 
character of the Creator's workings ere man was, in the 
remarkable text in which we are told that " God made man 
in his own image and Hkeness." There is no restriction 
here to moral quality : the moral image man had, and in 
large measure lost ; but the intellectual image he still re- 
tains. As a geometrician, as an arithmetician, as a chemist, 
as an astronomer, — in short, in all the departments of 



2G0 GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS 

what are known as the strict sciences, — man differs from 
his Maker, not in kind, but in degree, — not as matter 
differs from mind, or darkness from Hght, but simply as a 
mere portion of space or time differs from all space or all 
time. I have already referred to mechanical contrivances 
as identically the same in the Divine and human produc- 
tions; nor can I doubt that, not only in the pervading 
sense of the beautiful in form and color which it is our 
privilege as men in some degree to experience and possess, 
but also in that perception of harmony which constitutes 
the 'musical sense, and in that poetic feeling of which 
Scripture furnishes us with at once the earliest and the 
highest examples, and which we may term the poetic sense, 
we bear the stamp and impress of the Divine image. Now, 
if this be so, we must look upon the schemes of Creation, 
Revelation, and Providence, not as schemes of mere adapta- 
tion to man's nature, but as schemes also specially adapted 
to the nature of God as the pattern and original nature. 
Further, it speaks, I must hold, of the harmony and unity 
of one sublime scheme, that, after long ages of immaturity, 
— after the dynasties of the fish, the reptile, and the 
mammal should in succession have terminated, — man 
should have at length come upon the scene in the image 
of God ; and that, at a still later period, God himself should 
have come upon the scene in the form of man ; and that 
thus all God's workings in creation should be indissolubly 
linked to God himself, not by any such mere likeness or 
image of the Divinity as that which the first Adam bore, 
but by Divinity itself in the Second Adam ; so that on the 
rainbow-encircled apex of the pyramid of created being the 
Son of God and the Son of Man should sit enthroned for- 
ever in one adorable person. That man should have been 
made in the image of God seems to have been a meet 
preparation for God's after assumption of the form of man. 



ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 261 

It was perhaps thus secured that stock and grafts if I may 
venture on such a metaphor, should have the necessary- 
affinity, and be capable of being united in a single person. 
The false gods of the Egjnptians assumed, it was fabled, the 
forms of brutes : it was the human form and nature that 
was assumed by the true God ; — so far as we know, the 
only form and nature that could have brought him into 
direct union with at once the matter and mind of the 
imiverse which he had created and made, — with "true 
body and reasonable soul." Yet further, I learn by in- 
evitable inference from one of the more distinctive articles 
of my creed, that as certainly as the dynasty of the fish 
was predetermined in the scheme of Providence to be 
succeeded by the higher dynasty of the reptile, and that 
of the reptile by the still higher dynasty of the mammal, so 
it was equally predetermined that the dynasty of respons- 
ible, fallible man should be succeeded by the dynasty of 
glorified, immortal man ; and that, in consequence, the 
present mixed state of things is not a mere result, as some 
theologians believe, of a certain human act which was per- 
petrated about six thousand years ago, but was, virtually 
at least, the efiect of a God-determined decree, old as 
eternity, — a decree in which that act was written as a 
portion of the general programme. In looking abroad on 
that great history of life, of which the latter portions are 
recorded in the pages of revelation, and the earlier in the 
rocks, I feel my grasp of a doctrine first taught me by 
our CaUdnistic Catechism at my mother's knee, tightening 
instead of relaxing. " The decrees of God are his eternal 
purposes," I was told, " according to the counsel of his will, 
whereby for his own glory he hath foreordained whatso- 
ever comes to pass." And what I was told early I still 
believe. The programme of Creation and Providence, in 
all its successive periods, is of God, not of man. With tho 



262 GEOLOGY I^ ITS BEARINGS 

arrangements of the old geologic periods it is obvious 
man could have had nothing to do : the primeval ages of 
wondrous plants and monster animals ran their course 
without counsel taken of him ; and in reading their record 
in the bowels of the earth, and in learning from their 
strange characters that such ages there were, and what 
they produced, we are the better enabled to appreciate the 
impressive directness of the sublime message to Job, when 
the " Lord answered him out of the whirlwind, and said. 
Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth ? 
Declare if thou hast understanding." And I can as little 
regard the present scene of things as an ultimate conse- 
quence of what man had willed or wrought, as even any of 
the pre-Adamic ages. It is simply one scene in a fore- 
ordained series, — a scene intermediate in place between 
the age of the ii-responsible mammal and of glorified man ; 
and to provide for the upward passage to the ultimate 
state, we know that, in reference to the purposes of the 
Eternal, he through whom the work of restoration has 
been effected was in reality what he is designated in the 
remarkable text, " The Lamb slain from the foundations 
of the world." First m the course of things, man in the 
image of God, and next, in meet sequence, God in the form 
of man, have been equally from all eternity predetermined 
actors in the same great scheme. 

I approach a profound and terrible mystery. We can 
see how in the pre-Adamic ages higher should have suc- 
ceeded lower dynasties. To be low was not to be immoral ; 
to be low was not to be guilt-stained and miserable. The 
sea anemone on its half-tide rock, and the fern on its 
mossy hill-side, are low in their respective kingdoms ; but 
they are, notwithstanding, worthy, in their quiet, unob- 
trusive beauty, of the God who formed them. It is only 
when the human period begins that we arc startled and 



ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 263 

perplexed by the problem of a lowness not innocent, — an 
inferiority tantamount to moral deformity. In the period 
of responsibility, to be low means to be evil ; and how, we 
ask, could a lowness and inferiority resolvable into moral 
evil have had any place in the decrees of that Judge who 
ever does what is right, and in whom moral evil can have 
no place ? The subject is one which it seems not given to 
man thoroughly to comprehend. Permit me, however, to 
remark in reply, that in a sense so plain, so obvious, so 
unequivocally true, that it would lead an intelligent jury, 
impannelled in the case, conscientiously to convict, and a 
wise judge righteously to condemn, all that is evil in the 
present state of things man may as certainly have wrought 
out for himself, as the criminals whom we see sentenced at 
every justiciary court work out for themselves the course 
of punishment to which they are justly subjected. 

It has been well said of the Author of all by the poet, 
that, "binding nature fast in fate," he "left free the 
human will." And it is this freedom or independency of 
will operating on an intellect moulded after the image and 
likeness of the Divinity that has rendered men capable of 
being what the Scriptures so emphatically term "fellow- 
workers with God." In a humble and restricted sense, as 
I have already remarked, — humble and restricted, but in 
that restricted sense obviously true, — the surface of the 
earth far and wide testifies to this fact of fellowship in 
working. The deputed lord of creation, availing himself 
of God's natural laws, does what no mere animal of the old 
geologic ages ever did, or ever could have done, — he 
adorns and beautifies the earth, and adds tenfold to its 
original fertility and productiveness. In this special sense, 
then, he is a fellow- worker with Him who, according to 
the Psalmist, "causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, 
and herb for the service of man, and wine that maketh 



264 GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS 

glad the heart of man, and oil that maketh his face to 
shine, and bread which strengtheneth man's heart." But 
it is in a greatly higher sense, and in reference to God's 
moral laws, that he is fitted to be his fellow-worker in the 
Scriptm-al sense. And his proper employment in this de- 
partment is the elevation and development, moral and 
intellectual, of himself and his fellow-men, both in adapta- 
tion to the demands of the present time, and in preparation 
for a fixture state. 

All experience, however, serves to show that in this 
paramount department man greatly fails ; nay, that he is 
infinitely less true to his proper end and destiny than the 
beasts that perish to their several instincts. And yet it 
may be remarked, that such of the lower animals as are 
guided by pure instinct are greatly more infallible "v\athin 
their proper spheres than the higher, half-reasoning animals. 
The mathematical bee never constructs a false angle ; the 
sagacious dog is not unfrequently out in his calculations. 
The higher the animal in the scale, the greater its Habihty 
to error. But it is not the less true, that no fish, no 
reptile, no mammal, of the geologic or the recent ages, 
ever so failed in working out the purposes it was created 
to serve, as man has failed in working out his; fiirther, in 
no creature save in man does there exist that war of the 
mind between appetite and duty of which the Apostle so 
consciously complained. And we must seek an explanation 
of these twin facts in that original fi-eedom of the will 
which, while it rendered man capable of being of choice 
God's fellow-worker, also conferred on him an abihty of 
choosing not to work with God. And his choice of not 
working with him, or of working against him, being once 
freely made, we may see how, fi'om man's very constitution 
and nature, as an intelligence united to matter that in- 
creases his kind from generation to generation in virtue 



ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 2G5 

of the original law, the ability of again working with God 
might be forever destroyed. And thus man's general 
condition as a lapsed creature may be as unequivocally a 
consequence of man's oa\ti act, as the condition of indi- 
viduals born free, but doomed to slavery in punishment of 
their joffences, is a consequence of their own acts. A brief 
survey of the many-colored and variously-placed human 
fxmily, as at present distributed on the earth, may enable' 
us in some degree to conceive of a matter which, involving, 
as it does, that master problem of moral science, the origin 
of evil, seems, as I have said, not to be given to man fully 
to comprehend. 

" The different races of mankind," says Humboldt, em- 
ploying, let me remark, the language of the distinguished 
German naturalist Miiller, to give expression to the view 
which he himself adopts, — " the different races of mankind 
are not different species of a genus, but forms of one sole 
species." " The human species," says Cuvier, " appears to 
be single." "When we compare," says Pritchard, "all 
the facts and observations which have been heretofore fully 
established as to the specific instincts and separate psychical 
endowments of all the distinct tribes of sentient beings in 
the universe, we are entitled to draw confidently the con- 
clusion, that all human races are of one species and one 
family." " God hath made of one blood," said the Apostle 
Paul, in addressing himself to the elite of Athens, "all 
nations, for to dwell on the face of all the earth." Such, 
on this special head, is the testimony of Revelation, and 
such the conclusion of our highest scientific authorities. 
The question has, indeed, been raised in these latter times, 
whether each species of animals may not have been origi- 
nally created, not by single pairs or in single centres, but by 
several pairs and in several centres, and, of course, the 
human species among the rest ? And the query ^ — for in 
23 



2G6 GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS 

reality it amounts to nothing more, — has been favorably 
entertained on the other side of the Atlantic. On purely 
scientific grounds it is of course difficult to prove a negative 
in the case, just as it would be difficult to prove a negative 
were the question to be, whether the planet Yenus was not 
composed of quartz rock, or the planet Mars of Old Red 
Sandstone? But the portion of the problem really solvable 
by science, — the identity of the human race under all its 
conditions, and in all its varieties, — science has solved. It 
has determined that all the various tribes of man are but 
forms of a single species. And in the definition of species, 
— waiving the American doubt until it shall at least 
become something more, — I am content to follow the 
higher authorities. "We unite," says M. de Candolle, 
"under the designation of a S2)ecies, all those individuals 
that mutually bear to each other so close a resemblance as 
to allow of our supposing that they may have proceeded 
originally from a single being or a single pair." "A 
species^'''* says Buffon, "is a constant succession of indi- 
viduals similar to and capable of reproducing each other." 
"A 5J9ec^es," says Cuvier, "is a succession of individuals 
which reproduces and perpetuates itself." 

IN'ow, all history and all tradition, so far as they throw 
light on the question at all, agree in showing that the 
centre in which the human species originated must have 
been somewhere in the temperate regions of the East, not 
far distant from the Caucasian group of mountains. All 
the old seats of civilization, — that of Niiieveh, Babylon, 
Palestine, Egypt, and Greece, — are spread out around this 
centre. And it is certainly a circumstance worthy of 
notice, and surely not without bearing on the physical 
condition of primeval humanity, that in this centre we find 
a variety of the species which naturalists of the highest 
standing regard as fundamentally typical of th^ highest 



I 



ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 267 

races of the globe. " The natives of the Caucasus," says 
Cuvier, "are even now considered as the handsomest on 
earth." And wherever man has, if I may so speak, fallen 
least, — wherever he has retained, at least intellectually, 
the Divine image, — this Caucasian type of feature and 
figure, with, of course, certain national modifications, he 
also retains. It was developed in a remarkable degree 
among the old Greeks, as may be seen from the busts of 
some of their handsomer men ; and still more remarkably 
in their heau ideal of beauty, as exemplified in the statues 
of their gods. We see it also, though dashed with a 
shade of severity, in the strong forms and stern features 
of monarchs that reigned of old in Nineveh and Babylon, 
as brought to light in their impressive effigies by the exca- 
vations of Rawlinson and Layard. And further, though 
somewhat modified by the African dash, we detect it in 
the colossal statues of Egypt. Nor, as shoA^-n by Egyptian 
paintings still fresh in color and outline, was it less trace- 
able in the ancient Jewish countenance and figure. It is 
Still palpable, too, amid all the minor peculiarities of national 
physiognomy, in the various peoples of Europe. We may 
see it in our own country, though, as Sir Walter Scott 
truly tells us, — 

"The rugged form may mark the mountain band. 
And harsher features and a mien more grave." 

It walks, however, the boards of our Parliament House here 
in a very respectable type of Caucasian man ; and all agree 
that nowhere else in modem Europe is it to be found more 
true to its original contour than among the high-bred aris- 
tocracy of England, especially among the female members 
of the class. Looking, then, at the entire evidence, — at 
the admitted fact that the Circassians of the present day 
are an eminently handsome people, — that the old Greeks, 



268 GEOLOGY IX ITS BEARINGS 

Ninevites, Egyptians, Jews, Romans, and with these all the 
modern nations of Europe, are but the varieties of the 
central race that have retained in greatest perfection the 
original traits, — I do not see how we are to avoid the con- 
clusion that this Caucasian type was the type of Adamic 
man. Adam, the father of mankind, was no squalid savage 
of doubtful humanity, but a noble specimen of man ; and 
Eve a soft Circassian beauty, but exquisitely lovely beyond 
the lot of fallen humanity. 

" The loveliest pair 
That ever yet in love's embraces met : 
Adam, the goodliest man of men since born 
His sons ; the fairest of her daughters Eve." 

I know not whether I should add what follows. It has 
been said that Luke, the " beloved physician," was also a 
painter. It has been said that that traditionary, time- 
honored form, which we at once recognize in the pictures 
of the old masters as that of the Saviour of mankind, 
he in reality bore when he walked this earth in the fleslf 
I .know not what degree of probability attaches to the 
belief. I know not whether the traditionary form be in 
reality the true one. This, however, I know, that if such 
was the form which the adorable Redeemer assumed when 
he took to himself a real body and a reasonable soul, the 
second Adam, like the first, exemplified, when upon earth, 
the perfect type of Caucasian man. 

Let me next remark, that the further we remove from 
the original centre of the race, the more degraded and sunk 
do we find the several varieties of humanity. "We must 
set wholly aside, in our survey, the disturbing element of 
modern emigration. Caucasian man has been pressing out- 
wards. In the backwoods of America, in Southern Africa, 
in Australia, and in the Polynesian islands, the old Adamic 



ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 2G9 

type has been asserting its superiority, and annihilating 
before it the degraded races. But taking into account 
merely the aboriginal varieties, it seems to be a general 
rule, that the further we remove in any direction from the 
Adamic centre, the more animalized and sunk do we find 
the various tribes or races. Contrary to the conceptions of 
the assert ors of the development hypothesis, we ascertain, 
as we proceed outwards, that the course is not one of pro- 
gression from the low to the high, but of descent from the 
high to the low. Passing northwards, we meet, where the 
lichen-covered land projects into the frozen ocean, with the 
diminutive Laps, squat, ungraceful, with their flat features 
surmounted by pyramidal skulls of small capacity, and, as a 
race, unfitted for the arts either of peace or war. We meet 
also with the timid Namollas, with noses so flat as to be 
scarce visible in the women and children of the race ; and 
with the swarthy Kamtschatkans, with their broad faces, 
protuberant bellies, and thin, ill-formed legs. Passing south- 
Avards, we come to the negro tribes, -vvdth their sooty skins, 
broad noses, thick lips, projecting jawbones, and partially- 
Avebbed fingers. And then we find ourselves among the 
squalid Hottentots, repulsively ugly, and begrimmed with 
filth ; or the still more miserable Bushmen. Passing east- 
wards, after taking leave of the Persian and Indian branches 
of the Caucasian race, we meet with the squat Mongolian, 
with his high cheek bones set on a broad face, and his com- 
pressed, unintellectual, pig-like eyes ; or encounter, in the 
Indian Archipelago or the Australian interior, the pitiably 
low Alforian races, with their narrow, retreating foreheads, 
slim, feeble limbs, and baboon-like faces. Or, finally, passing 
westward, we find the large-jawed, coj^per-colored Indians 
of the Xew World, vigorous in some of the northern tribes 
as animals, though feeble as men, but gradually sinking in 
southern America, as among the wild Caribs or spotted 
23* 



1 



270 GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS 

' Araucans; till at the extremity of the continent we find, 
nailed and shivering among their snows, the hideous, small- 
eyed, small-limbed, flat-headed Fuegians, perhaps the most 
wretched of himaan creatures. And all these varieties of the 
species, in which we find humanity "fallen," according to the 
poet, " into disgrace," are varieties that have lapsed from the 
original Caucasian type. They are all the descendants of 
man as God created him ; but they do not exemplify man 
as God created him. They do not represent, save in hideous 
caricature, the glorious creature moulded of old by the 
hand of the Divine Worker. They are fallen, — degraded ; 
many of them, as races, hopelessly lost. For all experience 
serves to show, that when a tribe of men falls beneath a 
certain level, it cannot come into competition with civilized 
man, pressing outwards from his old centres to possess the 
earth, without becoming extinct before him. Sunk beneath 
a certain level, as in the forests of America, in Van Dieman's 
Land, in New South Wales, and among the Bushmen of 
the Cape, the experience of more than a hundred years 
demonstrates that its destiny is extinction, — not restoration. 
Individuals may be recovered by the labors of some zealous 
missionary ; but it is the fate of the race, after a few gen- 
erations, to disappear. It has fallen too hopelessly low to 
be restored. There remain curious traces in the Kew 
World of these perished tribes. The Bible, translated into 
an old Indian language, from which the devoted David 
Brainerd taught so successfully a nation of Red Men, still 
exists ; but it speaks in a dead tongue, which no one can now 
understand ; for the nation to whom he preached has become 
extinct. And Humboldt tells us, in referring to a perished 
tribe of South America, that there lived in 1806, when he 
visited their country, an old parrot in Maypures, which 
could not be understood, because, as the natives informed 
him, it spoke the language of the Atures. Tribes of the 



ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 271 

aborigines of Australia have wholly disappeared during the 
present generation ; and I remember seeing it stated in a 
newspaper paragraph, which appeared a few years ago, that 
the last male survivor of the natives of Tasmania was at 
that time in the latter stages of consumption. 

But if man, in at least the more degraded varieties of 
the race, be so palpably not what the Creator originally 
made him, by whom, then, was he made the poor lost 
creature which in these races we find him to be ? He was 
made what he is, I reply, by man himself; and this, in many 
instances, by a process which we may see every day taking 
place among ourselves in individuals and families, though 
happily, not in races. Man's nature again, — to employ the 
condensed statement of the poet, — has been bound fast in 
fate, but his will has been left free. He is free either to 
resign himself to the indolence and self-indulgence so natural 
to the species ; or, " spurning delights, to live laborious 
days ;" — free either to sink into ignorant sloth, dependent 
uselessness, and self-induced imbecility, bodily and mental, 
or to assert by honest labor a noble independence, — to 
seek after knowledge as for hidden treasures, and, in the 
search, to sharpen his faculties and invigorate his mind. 
And while we see around us some men addressing them- 
selves with stout, brave hearts to what Carlyle terms, with 
homely vigor, their " heavy job of work," and, by denying 
themselves many an insidious indulgence, doing it effectu- 
ally and well, and rearing up well-taught families in useful- 
ness and comfort, to be the stay of the future, we see other 
men yielding to the ignoble solicitations of appetite or of 
indolence, and becoming worse than useless themselves, and 
the parents of ignorant, immoral, and worse than useless 
fimilies. The wandering vagrants of Great Britain at the 
present time have been estimated at from fifteen to twenty 
thousand souls; the hereditary paupers of England, — a 



272 GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS 

vastly more numerous class, — have become, in a consider, 
able degree, a sept distinct from the general community; 
and in all our large towns there are certain per centages 
of the population, — unhappily ever increasing per centages, 
— that, darkened in mind and embruted in sentiment, are 
widely recognized as emphatically the dangerous classes of 
the community. And let us remember that we are witness- 
ing in these instances no new thing in the history of the 
species: every period since that of the vagabond Cain- 
has had its waifs and stragglers, who fell behind in the 
general march. In circumstances such as obtained in the 
earlier ages of the human family, all the existing nomades 
and paupers of our country would have passed into distinct 
races of men. For in the course of a few generations their 
forms and complexions would begin to tell of the self- 
induced degradation that had taken place in their minds ; 
and in a few ages more they would have become permanent 
varieties of the species. There are cases in which not more 
than from two to three centuries have been found sufficient 
thoroughly to alter the original physiognomy of a race. 
"On the plantation of Ulster in 1611, and afterwards, on 
the success of the British against the rebels in 1641 and 
1689," says a shrewd writer of the present day, himself an 
Irishman, " great multitudes of the native Irish were diiven 
from Armagh and the south of Down, into the mountainous 
tract extending from the Barony of Fleurs eastward to the 
sea ; on the other side of the kingdom the same race were 
exposed to the worst effects of hunger and ignorance, the 
two great brutalizers of the human race. . The descen- 
dants of these exiles are now distinguished physically by 
great degradation. They are remarkable for open, project- 
ing mouths, with prominent teeth and exposed gums ; and 
their advancing cheek bones and depressed noses bear bar- 
barism on their very front. In Sligo and northern Mayo 



ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 273 

the consequences of the two centuries of degradation and 
hardship exhibit themselves in the whole physical condition- 
of the people, affecting not only the features, but the frame. 
Five feet two inches on an average, — pot-bellied, bow-leg- 
ged, abortively featured, their clothing a ^dsp of rags, — 
these spectres of a people that were once well-grown, able- 
bodied, and comely, stalk abroad into the daylight of civil- 
ization, the annual apparition of Irish ugliness and Irish 
want." 

Such is man as man himself has made him, — not man as 
he came from the hand of the Creator. In many instances 
the degradation has been voluntary ; in others it has been 
forced upon families and races by the iron hand of oppres- 
sion ; in almost all, — whether self-chosen by the parents 
or imposed upon them, — the children and the children's 
children have, as a matter of inevitable necessity, been 
born to it. For, whatever we may think of the Scriptural 
doctrine on this special head, it is a fact broad and palpable 
in the economy of nature, that parents do occuj^y a federal 
position; and that the lapsed progenitors, when cut off 
from civilization and all external interference of a missionary 
character, become the founders of a lapsed race. The 
iniquities of the parents are visited upon the children. 
And in all such instances it is man left to the freedom of 
his own v^-ill that is the deteriorator of man. The doctrine 
of the Fall, in its purely theologic aspect, is a doctrine 
which must be apprehended by faith; but it is at least 
something to find that the analogies of science, instead of 
runnmg counter to it, run in exactly the same Ime. It is 
one of the inevitable consequences of that nature of man 
which the Creator " bound fast in fate," while he left free 
his will, that the free will of the parent should become the 
destiny of the child. 

But the subject is one in which we can see our way as 



274 GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS 

but " through a glass darkly." Kay, it is possible that the 
master problem which it involves no created intelligence 
can thoroughly unlock. It has been well said, that the 
" poet's heart " is informed by a " terrible sagacity ; " and 
I am at times disposed to regard Milton's conception of the 
perplexity of the fallen spirits, v/hen reasoning on " fixed 
fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute," and finding "no 
end in wandering mazes lost," much rather as a sober truth 
caught from the invisible world, than as merely an inge- 
nious fancy. The late Robert Montgomery has rather un- 
happily chosen Satan as one of the themes of his muse ; 
and in his long poem, designated in its second title "Intel- 
lect without God," he has set that personage a-reasoning 
in a style which, I fear, more completely demonstrates the 
absence of God than the presence of intellect. It has, 
however, sometimes occurred to me, that a poet of the 
larger calibre, who to the Divine faculty and vision added 
such a knowledge of geologic science as that which Yirgii 
possessed of the Natural History of his time, or as that 
which Milton possessed of the general learning of ^^s, 
might find, in a somewhat similar subject, the materials of a 
poem which " posterity would not willingly let die." There 
is one of the satirists justly severe on a class of critics 

" Who, drily plain, without invention's aid. 
Write dull receipts how poems may be made." 

But at some risk of rendering myself obnoxious to his 
censure, I shall attempt indicating at least the general 
scope and character of what the schoolmen might term 
a 2^ossihle poem ; which, if vivified by the genius of some 
of the higher masters of the lyre, broad of faculty, and 
at once great poets and great men, might prove one 
precious boon more to the world, suited, conformably to 
the special demands of these latter times, -to 



ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 275 

" assert Eternal rrovidence. 
And justify the ways of God to man." 

There has been war among the intelligences of God's 
spiritual creation. Lucifer, son of the morning, has fallen 
like fire from heaven; and our present earth, existing as 
a half-extinguished hell, has received him and his angels. 
Dead matter exists, and in the unembodied spirits vitality 
exists ; but not yet in all the universe of God has the 
A-itality been united to the matter ; animal life, to even the 
profound apprehension of the fallen angel, is an incon- 
ceivable idea. Meanwhile, as the scarce reckoned cen- 
turies roll by, vacantly and dull, like the cheerless days 
and nights over the head of some unhappy captive, the 
miserable prisoners of our planet become aware that there 
is a slow change taking place in the condition of their 
prison-house. Where a low, dark archipelago of islands 
raise their flat backs over the thermal waters, the heat 
glows less intensely than of old ; the red fire bursts forth 
less frequently ; the dread earthquake shakes more rarely ; 
save in a few centres of intenser action, the great deep no 
longer boils like a pot ; and though the heavens are still 
shut out by a gray ceiling of thick vapor, through which 
sun or moon never yet appeared, a less gloomy twilight 
struggles at noonday through the enveloping cloud, and 
falls more cheerfully than heretofore upon land and sea. 
At length there comes a morning in which great ocean 
and the scattered islands declare that God the Creator 
had descended to >isit the earth. The hitherto verdureless 
land bears the gi^en flush of vegetation; and there are 
creeping things among the trees. Nor is the till now 
unexampled mystery of animal life absent from the sounds 
and bays. It is the highest intelligences that manifest the 
deepest intere^ in the works of the All Wise. Nor can 
we doubt that^pthat morning of creative miracle, in which 




276 GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS 

matter and vitality were first united in the bonds of a 
strange wedlock, the comprehensive intellect of the great 
fallen spirit — profomid and active beyond the lot of hu- 
manity — would have found ample employment in attempt- 
ing to fathom the vast mystery, and in vainly asking what 
these strange things might mean. 

"With how much of wonder, as scene succeeded scene, 
and creation followed creation, — as Hfe sprang out of 
death, and death out of life, — must not that acute Intel- 
ligence have watched the course of the Divine Worker, 
— scornful of spirit and full of enmity, and yet aware, 
in the inner depths of his intellect, that what he dared 
insultingly to depreciate, he yet failed, in its ultimate 
end and purpose, adequately to comprehend! Standing 
in the presence of unsolved mystery, under the chill and 
withermg shadow of that secret of the Lord which was 
not with him, how thoroughly must he not have seen, and 
with what bitter malignity felt, that the grasp of the 
Almighty was still upon him, and that in the ever varying 
problem of creation, which, with all his powers, he failed 
to unlock, and which, as age succeeded age, remained an 
unsolved problem still, the Divine Master against whom he 
had rebelled, but from whose presence it was in vain to 
flee, emphatically spake to him, as in an after age to the 
patriarch Job, and, with the quiet dignity of the Infinite, 
challenged him either to do or to know ! " Shall he that 
contendeth with the Almighty instru^ him ? He that 
reproveth God, let him answer. Kn^Sst thou the ordi- 
nances of Heaven ? or canst thou set tSHIominion thereof 
in the earth?" With what wild thoughts must that 
restless and unhappy sj^irit have wandered amid the 
tangled mazes of the old carboniferousf^ferests ! With 
'what bitter mockeries must he have watjj^d the fierce 
vyai'S \vhiqh raged in then- sluggish waters JBfeDg ravenous 




ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 277 

creatures horrid with trenchant teeth, barbed sting, and 
sharp spine, and enveloped in glittering armor of plate and 
scale! And how, as generation after generation passed 
away, and ever and anon the ocean rolled where the land 
had been, or the land rose to possess the ancient seats of 
the ocean, — how, when looking back upon myriads of 
ages, and when calling up m memory what once had been, 
the features of earth seemed scarce more fixed to his view 
than the features of the sky in a day of dappled, breeze- 
borne clouds, — how must he have felt, as he . became 
conscious that the earth was fast ripening, and that, as its 
foundations became stable on the abyss, it was made by 
the Creator a home of higher and yet higher forms of 
existence, — how must he have felt, if, like some old augur 
looking into the inner mysteries of animal life, "wdth their 
strange prophecies, the truth had at length burst upon him, 
that reasoning, accountable man was fast coming to the 
birth, — man, the moral agent, — man, the ultimate work 
and end of creation, — man, a creature in whom, as in the 
inferior animals, vitality was to be united to matter, but 
in whom also, as in no inferior animal, responsibility was 
to be united to vitality! How must expectancy have 
quickened, — how must solicitude have grown, — when, 
after the dynasty of the fish had been succeeded by the 
dynasty of the reptile, and that of the reptile by the 
dynasty of the sagacious mammal, a time had at length 
arrived when the^arth had become fixed and stable, and 
the proud waves of ocean had been stayed, — when, after 
species and genera in both kingdoms had been increased 
tenfold beyond the precedent of any former age, the 
Creative Hand seemed to pause in its working, and the 
finished creation to _ demand its lord! Even at this late 
period, how strange may not the doubts and uncertainties 
have been that remained to darken the mind of the lost 



278 GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS 

Spirit ! It was according to his experience, — stretched 
backwards to the first beginnings of organic vitality, and 
coextensive, at a still earlier period, with God's spiritual 
universe, — that all animals should die, — that all moral 
agents should live. How, in this new creature, — this 
prodigy of creation, who was to unite what never before 
had been united, — the nature of the animals that die with 
the standing and resj)onsibility of the moral agents that 
live^ — how, in this partaker of the double nature, was the 
discrepancy to be reconciled ? How, in this matter, were 
the opposite claims of life and death to bQ adjusted, or 
the absolute immortality^ which cannot admit of degrees, 
to be made to meet with and shade into the m,ortality 
which, let us extend the term of previous vitality as we 
may, must forever involve the antagonistic idea of final 
annihilation and the ceasing to be ? 

At length creation receives its deputed monarch. For, 
moulded by God's own finger, and in God's own likeness, 
man enters upon the scene, an exquisite creature, rich in 
native faculty, pregnant with the yet undeveloped seeds 
of all wisdom and knowledge, tender of heart and pure 
of spirit, formed to hold high communion with his Creator, 
and to breathe abroad his soul in sjonpathy over all that 
the Creator had made. And yet, left to the freedom of 
his own will, there is a weakness in the flesh that betrays 
his earthly lineage. It is into the dust of the ground that 
the living soul has been breathed. The son of the soil, 
who, like the inferior animals, his subjects, sleeps and 
wakes, and can feel thii'st and hunger, and the weariness 
of toil, and the sweets of rest, and who come under the 
general law, "increase and multiply," promulgated of old 
to them, stands less firmly than the immaterial spirits stood 
of old ; and yet even they rebelled against Heaven, and 
fell. There awakes a grim hope in the sullen lord of the 



ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 279 

first revolt. Ages beyond tale or reckoning has this 
temple of creation been in building. Long have its mute 
prophecies in fishes and in creeping things, in bird and in 
beast, told of coming man, its final object and end. And 
now there needeth but *one blow, and the whole edifice 
is destroyed, God's purposes marred and frustrated, and 
this new favorite of earth dashed back to the dust out 
of which he was created, and brought, like the old, extinct 
races, imder the eternal law of death. Armed with the 
experience in evil of unsummed ages, the Tempter plies 
his work : nor is it to low or ignoble appetites that he 
appeals. It is to the newly-formed creature's thirst for 
knowledge ; it is to his love stronger than death. The wiles 
of the Old Serpent prevail ; man falls prostrate before 
him ; creation trembles ; and then from amid the trees 
of the garden comes the voice of God. And lo! in 
an enigma mysterious and dark a new dispensation of 
prophecy begins. Victims bleed ; altars smoke ; the tab- 
ernacle arises amid the white tents of the desert ; the 
temple ascends all glorious on the heights of Mount Zion ; 
prophet after pro23het declares his message. At length, 
in the fiilness of time, the Messiah comes ; and, in satisfy- 
ing the law, and in fulfilling all righteousness, and in 
bringing life and immortality to light, abundantly shows 
forth tliat the terminal dynasty of all creation had been of 
old foreordained, ere the foundations of the Avorld, to 
possess for its eternal lord and monarch, not primeval man, 
created in the image of God, but God, made manifest in 
the flesh, in the form of primeval man. But how breaks 
on the baffled Tempter the sublime revelation ? Wearily 
did he toil, — darkly did he devise, and take, in his great 
misery, deep counsel against the Almighty; and yet all 
the while, while striving and resisting as an enemy, has 
he been wielded as a tool; when, glaring aloof in his 



vV 



280 GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS 

proud rebellion, the grasp of the Omnipotent has been 
upon him, and the Eternal Purposes have encompassed 
him, and he has been working out, all unwittingly, the 
foreordained decree. "For our God maketh the wrath 
of the wicked to praise him, and the remainder thereof 
doth he restrain." 

But enough, for the present, of the poems that might 
be. Permit me, however, to add, in the words of one of 
the most suggestive, and certainly not least powerful, of 
English thinkers, that " a fall of some sort or other, — the 
creation, as it were, of the non-absolute, — is the funda- 
mental postulate of the moral history of man. Without 
this hypothesis," he adds, " man is unintelligible, — with it 
every phenomenon is explicable. The mystery itself is too 
profound for human insight." Such, in this matter, was 
the ultimate judgment of a man who in youth had enter- 
tained very opposite ^aews, — the poet Coleridge. 

It has been said that the inferences of the geologist 
militate against those of the theologian. Xay, not those 
of our higher geologists and higher theologians, — not 
what our Murchisons and Sedgwicks infer in tjie one field, 
with what our Chalmerses and Isaac Taylors infer in the 
other. Between the Word and the Works of God there 
can be no actual discrepancies ; and the seeming ones are 
discernible only by the men who see worst. 

*' Mote-like they flicker in unsteady eyes. 
And weakest his who best descries." 

The geologist, as certainly as the theologian, has a province 
exclusively his own ; and were the theologian ever to re- 
member that the Scriptures could not possibly have been 
given to us as revelations of scientific truth, seeing that a 
single scientific truth they never yet revealed, and the 
geologist that it must be in vain to seek in science those 



ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 281 

truths which lead to salvation, seeing that in science these 
truths were never yet found, there would be little danger 
even of difference among them, and none of collision. Nay, 
there is, I doubt not, a time coming in which the Butlers 
and Chalmerses of the future will be content to recognize 
the geologic field as that of their richest and most pregnant 
analogies. It is with the history of the pre-Adamic ages 
that geology sets itself to deal ; and by carefully conning 
the ancient characters graven in the rocks, and by decipher- 
ing the strange inscriptions which they compose, it greatly 
extends the record of God's doings upon the earth. And 
what more natural to expect, or rational to hold, than that 
the Unchangeable One should have wrought in all time 
after one general type and pattern, or than that we may 
seek, in ^ the hope of finding, meet correspondences and 
striking analogies between his revealed workings during 
the human period, and his previous workings of old during 
the geologic periods, — correspondences and analogies suited 
to establish the identity of the worker, and, of course, from 
that identity to demonstrate the authenticity of the revela- 
tion ? Permit me to bring out, in conclusion, what I have 
often thought on this subject, but have not been able so 
tersely to express, in a brief quotation from one of the 
most instructive works of the present age, the "Method 
of the Divine Government," by the Rev. Dr. M'Cosh: — • 
" Science has a foundation," says this solid thinker and 
accomplished writer, " and so has religion. Let them unite 
their foundations, and the basis will be broader, and they 
will be two compartments of one great fabric reared to the 
glory of God. Let the one be the outer and the other 
the inner court. In the one let all look, and admire, and 
adore; and in the other let those who have faith kneel, 
J ^ and pray, and praise. Let the one be the sanctuary where 
human learning may present its richest incense as aa 
24* 



282 GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS, ETC. 

offering to God, and the other, the holiest of all, separated 
from it by a veil now rent in twain, and in which, on a 
blood-sprinkled mercy seat, we pour out the love of a rec- 
onciled heart, and hear the oracles of the living God,'* 



LECTURE SEVENTH. 

THE NOACHIA]^ DELUGE. 
PART I, 

There are events so striking in themselves or from their 
accompaniments, that they powerfully impress the memories 
of children but little removed from infancy, and are retained 
by them in a sort of troubled recollection ever after, how- 
ever extended their term of life. Samuel Johnson was only 
two and a half years old when, in accordance with the 
belief of the time, he was touched by Queen Anne for the 
" Evil ; " but more than seventy years after, he could call 
np in memory a dream-like recollection of the lady dressed 
in a black hood, and gUttering with diamonds, mto whose 
a^vful presence he had been ushered on that occasion, and 
who had done for the cure of his complaint all that legiti- 
mate royalty could do. And an ancient lady of the north 
country, who had been carried, when a child, in her nurse's 
arms, to witness the last witch execution that took place in 
Scotland, could distinctly tell, after the lapse of nearly a 
century, that the fire was surrounded by an awe-struck 
crowd, and that the smoke of the burning, when blown 
about her by a cross breeze, had a foul and sufibcating 
odor. In this respect the memory of infant tribes and 
nations seems to resemble that of individuals. There are 
characters and events which impress it so strongly, that 
they seem never to be forgotten, but live as traditions, 
sometimes mayhap very vague, and much modified by the 



284 THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 

inventions of an after time, but which, in floating down- 
wards to late ages, always bear about them a certain 
strong impress of their pristine reality. They are shadows 
that have become ill defined from the vast distance of the 
objects that cast them, — like the shadows of great birds 
flung, in a summer's day, from the blue depths of the sky 
to the landscape far below, — but whose very presence, 
however difi'used they may have become, testifies to the 
existence of the remote realities from which they are 
thrown, and without which they could have had no being 
at all. The old mythologies are filled with shadowy tradi- 
tions of this kind, — shadows of the world's "gray fathers," 
• — which, like those shadows seen reflected on clouds by 
travellers who ascend lofty mountains, are exaggerated 
into the most gigantic proportions, and bear radiant glories 
around their heads. 

There is, however, one special tradition which seems to 
be more deeply impressed and more widely spread than 
any of the others. The destruction of well nigh the whole 
human race, in an early age of the world's history, by a 
great deluge, appears to have so impressed the minds of 
the few survivors, and seems to have been handed down 
to their children, in consequence, with such terror-struck 
impressiveness, that their remote descendants of the present 
day have not even yet forgotten it. It appears in almost 
every mythology, and lives in the most distant countries, 
and among the most barbarous tribes. It was the laudable 
ambition of Humboldt, — first entertained at a very early 
period of life, — to penetrate into distant regions, unknown 
to the natives of Europe at the time, that he might acquaint 
himself, in fields of research altogether fresh and new, with 
men and with nature in their most primitive conditions. 
In carrying out his design, he journeyed far into the 
"VTOody wilderness that surrounds the Orinoco, and found 



THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 285 

himself among tribes of Avild Indians whose very names 
were miknown to the civilized world. And yet among 
even these forgotten races of the human family he found 
the tradition of the deluge still fresh and distinct; not 
confined to single tribes, but general among the scattered 
nations of that great region, and intertwined with curious 
additions, suggestive of the inventions of classic mythology 
in the Old "World. " The belief in a great deluge," we 
find him saying, " is not confined to one nation singly, — 
the Tamanacs : it makes part of a system of historical 
tradition, of which we find scattered notions among the 
Maypures of the great cataracts; among the Indians of 
the Rio Erevato, which runs into the Caura; and among 
almost all the tribes of the Upper Orinoco. When the 
Tamanacs are asked how the human race survived this 
great deluge, — *the age of water'' of the Mexicans, — they 
say, a man and woman saved themselves on a high moun- 
tain called Tamanacu, situated on the banks of the Asiveru, 
and, casting behind them over their heads the fruits of the 
mauritia palm-tree, they saw the seeds contained in these 
fruits produce men and women, who re-peopled the earth. 
Thus," adds the philosophic traveller, " we find in all sim- 
plicity, among nations now in a savage state, a tradition 
which the Greeks embelHshed with all the charms of 
imagination." The resemblance is certainly very striking. 
"Quit the temple," said the Oracle to Deucalion and 
Pyrrha, when they had consulted it, after the great del- 
uge, regarding the mode in which the earth was to be 
re-peopled, — "vail your heads, unloose your girdles, and 
throw behind your backs the bones of your grandmother." 
Rightly interpreting what seemed darkest and most ob- 
scure in the reply, they took " stones of the earth," and, 
casting them behind them, the stones flung by Deucalion 
became men, and those by Pyrrha became women, and 



286 THE NOACIIIAN DELUGE. 

thus the disfurnished world was peopled anew. The navi> 
gator always regards himself as sure of his position when 
he has two landmarks to determine it by, or when in the 
open ocean he can ascertain, not only his latitude, but his 
longitude also. And this curious American tradition seems 
to have its two such marks, — its two bisecting lines of 
determination, — to identify it with the classic tradition 
of the Old World that refers evidently to the same great 
event. 

There are other portions of America in which the tradi- 
tion of the Flood is still more distinct than among the 
forests of the Orinoco. It is related by Herrera, one of 
the Spanish historians of America, that even the most 
barbarous of the Brazilians had some knowledge of a 
general deluge ; that in Peru the ancient Indians reported, 
that many years before there were any Incas, all the people 
were drowned by a great flood, save six persons, the pro- 
genitors of the existing races, who were saved on a float ; 
that among the Mechoachans it was believed that a single 
family was preserved, during the outburst of the waters, in 
an ark, with a sufficient number of animals to replenish the 
new world ; and, more curious still, that it used to be told 
by the original inhabitants of Cuba, that "an old man, 
knowing the deluge was to come, built a great ship, and 
went into it with his family and abundance of animals ; and 
that, wearying during the continuance of the flood, he sent 
out a crow, which at first did not return, staying to feed 
on the dead bodies, but afterwards returned bearing with 
it a green branch." The resemblance borne by this last 
tradition to the Mosaic narrative is so close as to aAvaken a 
doubt whether it may not have been but a mere recollection 
of the teaching of some early missionary. Nor can its 
genuineness now be tested, seeing that the race which 
cherished it has been long since extinct. It may be stated, 



THE NOACHIAIsr DELUGE 287 

'■er, that a similar suspicion crossed the mind of Ilum^ 
boldt Avhen he was engaged in collecting the traditions of 
the Indians of the Orinoco ; but that on further reflection 
and inquiry I\e dismissed the doubt as groundless. He 
even set himself to examine whether the district was not a 
fossiliferous one, and whether beds of sea shells, or deposits 
charged with the petrified remains of corals or of fishes, 
might not have originated among the aborigines some 
mere myth of a great inundation sujfficient to account for 
the appearances in the rocks. But he found that the 
region was mainly a primary one, in which he could detect 
only a single patch of sedimentary rock, existing as an 
unfossiliferous sandstone. And so, though little prejudiced 
in favor of the Mosaic record, he could not avoid arriving 
at the conclusion, simply in his character as a philosophic 
inquii-er, who had no other object than to attain to the 
real and the true, that the legend of the wild Maypures 
and Tamanacs regarding a great destructive deluge was 
simply one of the many forms of that oldest of traditions 
which appears to be well nigh coextensive with the human 
family, and which, in all its varied editions, seems to point 
at one and the same signal event. Very varied some of 
these editions are. The inhabitants of Tahiti tell, for in- 
stance, that the Supreme God, a long time ago, being 
angry, dragged the earth through the sea, but that by a 
happy accident their island broke off and was preserved ; 
the Indians of Terra Firma believe, that when the great 
deluge took place, one man, with his wife and children, 
escaped in a canoe ; and the Indians of the North American 
lakes hold, that the father of all their tribes being warned 
in a dream that a flood was coming, built a raft, on which 
he preserved his family, and pairs of all the animals, and 
which drifted about for many months, until at length a 



288 THE ITOACHIAN DELUGE. 

new earth was made for their reception by the " Mighty- 
Man above." 

In that widely extended portion of the Old World over 
which Christianity has spread in its three great types, — 
Greek, Romish, and Protestant, — and in the scarce less 
extended portion occui^ied by the followers of Mohammed, 
the Scriptm-al account of the deluge, or the imperfect 
reflection of it borrowed by the Koran, has, of course, 
supplanted the old traditions. But outside these regions 
we find the traditions existing still. One of the sacred 
books of the Parsees (representatives of the ancient Per- 
sians) records, that " the world having been corrupted by 
Ahriman the Evil One, it was thought necessary to bring 
over it a universal flood of waters, that all impurity might 
be washed away. Accordingly the rain came dowai in 
drops as large as the head of a bull, until the earth was 
wholly covered with water, and all the creatures of the 
Evil One perished. And then the flood gradually subsided, 
and first the mountains, and next the plains, apj^eared once 
more." In the Scandinavian Edda, between whose wild 
fables and those of the sacred books of the Parsees there 
has been a resemblance traced by accomplished antiquaries 
such as Mallet, the tradition of the deluge takes a singularly 
monstrous form. On the death of the great giant Ymir, 
whose flesh and bones form the rocks and soils of the 
earth, and who was slain by the early gods, his blood, 
which now constitutes the ocean, rushed so copiously out 
of his wounds, that all the old race of the lesser giants, his 
offspring, were drowned in the flood which it occasioned, 
save one ; and he, by escaping on board his bark with his 
wife, outlived the deluge. The tradition here is evidently 
allegorized, but it is by no means lost in the allegory. 

Sir William Jones, perhaps the most learned and accom- 



THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 289 

plished man of his age (such at least was the estimate of 
Johnson), and the first who fairly opened up the great 
storehouse of eastern antiquities, describes the tradition 
of the deluge as prevalent also in the vast Chinese empire, 
with its three hundred millions of people. He states that 
it was there believed that, just ere the appearance of Fohi 
in the mountains, a mighty flood, which first "flowed 
abundantly^ and then subsided, covered for a time the 
whole earth, and separated the higher from the lower age 
of mankind." The Hindu tradition, as related by Sir 
William, though disfigured by strange additions, is still 
more explicit. An evil demon having purloined the sacred 
books from Brahma, the whole race of men became corrupt 
except the seven Xishis, and in especial the holy Satyavrata, 
the prince of a maritime region, who, when one day 
bathing in a river, was visited by the god Vishnu in the 
shape of a fish, and thus addressed by him : — "In seven 
days all creatures who have offended me shall be destroyed 
by a deluge; but thou shalt be secured in a capacious 
vessel, mfraculously formed. Take, therefore, all kinds of 
medicinal herbs, and esculent grain for food, and, together 
with the seven holy men, your respective wives, and pairs 
of all animals, enter the ark without fear : then shalt thou 
know God face to face, and all thy questions shall be 
answered." The god then disappeared ; and after seven 
days, during which Satyavrata had conformed in all re- 
spects to the instructions given him, the ocean began to 
overflow the coasts, and the earth to be flooded by constant 
rains, when a large vessel was seen coming floating shore- 
wards on the rising waters ; into which the Prince and the 
seven virtuous Xishis entered, with their wives, all laden 
with plants and grain, and accompanied by the animals. 
During the deluge Vishnu preserved the ark by again 
taking the form of a fish, and tying it fast to himself; and 
25 



290 THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 

when the waters had subsided, he communicated the con- 
tents of the sacred books to the holy Satyavrata, after 
first slaying the demon who had stolen them. It is added, 
however, that the good man having, on one occasion long 
after, by "the act of destiny," drunk mead, he became 
senseless, and lay asleep naked, and that Charma, one of 
three sons who had been born to him, finding him in that 
sad state, called on his two brothers to witness the shame 
of their father, and said to them. What has now befallen ? 
In what state is this our sire ? But by the two brothers, 
— more dutiful than Charma, — he was hidden with clothes, 
and recalled to his senses ; and, having recovered his intel- 
lect, and perfectly knowing what had passed, he cursed 
Charma, saying, "Thou shalt be a servant of servants." 
It would be difficult certainly to produce a more curious 
legend, or one more strikingly illustrative of the mixture 
of truth and fable which must ever be looked for in that 
tradition which some are content to accept even in religion 
as a trustworthy guide. In ever varying tradition, as in 
those difficult problems in physical science which have to be 
wrought out from a multitude of difiering observations, it 
is, if I may so express myself, the mean result of the whole 
that must be accepted as approximately the true one. And 
the mean result of those dim and distorted recollections of 
the various tribes of men which refer to the Flood is a 
result which bears simply to this efiect, — that in some 
early age of the world a great deluge took jDlace, in which 
well nigh the whole human family was destroyed. 

The ancient traditions which have come down to us 
embalmed in classic literature form but a small portion of 
what seems once to have existed in the wide region now 
overspread by Christianity and Mohammedanism. A second 
deluge, more fatal to at least the productions of the human 
mind than the first had been, overspread the earth during 



THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 291 

what are known as the Middle Ages ; and so signal was the 
wreck which it occasioned, that of seven heathen writers * 
whose testimony regarding the Flood Josephus cites as 
corroborative of his own, not one has descended in his 
writings to these later times. We learn, however, from 
the Jewish historian, that one of their number, Berosus, 
was a Chaldean ; that two of the others, Hieronymus and 
Manetho, were Egyptians; and that a third, Nicolaus, 
whose history he quotes, was a citizen of Damascus. 
" There is," said this latter writer, in his perished history, 
" a great mountain in Armenia, over Minyas, called Baris, 
upon which it is reported that many who fled at the time 
of the deluge were saved ; and that one who was carried 
in an ark came on shore on the top of it ; and that the 
remains of the timber were a great while preserved. This 
might be the man," added this forgotten writer, "about 
whom Moses, the legislator of the Jews, wrote." The 
works of the Chaldean, Berosus, have long since been lost, 
all save a few extracts preserved by the Patristic writers. 
One of these, however, which embodies the Chaldean tra- 
dition of the Flood, is very remarkable. Like the Scandi- 
navian legend, it represents the antediluvians as giants, all 
of whom, save one, became exceedingly impious and de- 
praved. "But there was one among the giants," says 
Berosus, "that reverenced the gods, and was more wise 
and prudent than all the rest. His name was Xoa; he 
dwelt in Syria, with his three sons, Sem, Japet, Chem, and 
their waves, the great Tidea, Pandora, Xoela, and Xoegla. 
This man, fearing the destruction which, he foresaw from 
the stars, would come to pass, began, in the seventy-eighth 
year before the inundation, to build a ship covered like an 

* Berosus, Hieronynms, Mnaseas, Nicolaus, Manetho, Mochus, and 
Hestaeus. 



292 THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 

ark. Seventy-eight years from the time he began to build 
this ship, the ocean of a sudden broke out, and all the 
inland seas and the rivers and fountains bursting from 
beneath (attended by the most violent rains from heaven 
for many days), overflowed all the mountains; so that the 
whole human race was buried in the watefrs, except ^N'oa 
and his famil}^, who were saved by means of the ship, 
which, being lifted up by the waters, rested at last upon 
the top of the Gendyae or Mountain, on which, it is 
reported, there now remaineth some part, and that men 
take away the bitumen from it, and make use of it by way 
of charm or expiation, to avoid evil." A more general 
Assyrian tradition, somewhat different in its details, also 
survives.* The god Chronus, it was said, appeared in a 
vision to Xisuthrus, the tenth king of Babylon ; and, Avarn- 
ing him that on a certain day there would be a great flood 
upon the earth, by which mankind would be destroyed, he 
enjoined him to build a vessel, and to bring into it his 
friends and relatives, Avith everything necessary to sustain 
life, and all the A^arious animals, birds, and quadrupeds. 
In obedience to the command, the king built a A^essel about 
three quarters of a mile in length and half a mile in 
breadth, AA^hich he loaded Avith stores and the different 
kinds of animals ; and into Avhich, on the day of the flood, 
he himself entered, accompanied by his AA'ife and children, 
and all his friends. The flood broke out. After, hoAvcA'er, 
accomplishing its Avork of destruction, it abated ; and the 
king sent out birds from the vessel, AA'hich, at first finding 
no food or place of rest, returned to him ; but Avhich, Avhen, 
after the lapse of some days, he sent them forth again, 
came back to him Avith their feet tinged Avith mud. On a 
thirS. trial they returned no more ; upon AA^hich, judging 

* Sec Cory's "Ancient Fragments/ 



THE NOACIIIAN DELUGE. 293 

that the surface of the earth was laid dry, he made an 
opening in tlie vessel, and, looking forth, found it stranded 
on a mountain of the land of Armenia. 

There seems to exist no such definite outline of the 
Egyptian tradition referred to by Josephus as that pre- 
served of the Chaldean one. Plato, in his " Tima3us," 
makes the Egyptian priest whom he introduces as dis- 
coursing with Solon, to attribute that clear recollection 
of a remote antiquity W'hich survived in Egj^pt, to its 
comparative freedom from those great floods which had 
at various times desolated Greece, and destroyed the 
memory of remote events by the destruction of the peo- 
ple and their records ; and Bacon had evidently this 
passage in view when he poetically remarked, m his mag- 
nificent essay on the " Vicissitude of Things," that " the 
great winding sheets that bury all things in oblivion are 
two, — deluges and earthquakes ; from which two destruc- 
tions is to be noted," he adds, " that the remnant of people 
that happen to be preserved are commonly ignorant and 
mountainous people, that can give no account of the time 
past." Even in Egyj^t, however, the recollection of the 
deluge seems to have survived, though it lay entangled 
amid what seem to be symbolized memories of unusual 
floodings of the river Nile. " The Noah of Egypt," says 
Professor Hitchcock, in his singularly ingenious essay (His- 
torical and Geological Deluges Compared), " appears to 
have been Osiris. Tyj^hon, a personification of the ocean, 
enticed him into an ark, which, being closed, he was forced 
to sea; and it was a curious fact, that he embarked on 
the seventeenth day of the month Athyr, — the very day,* 
most probably, when Noah entered the ark." The classi. 
cal tradition of Greece, as if the events whence it took its 
rise had been viewed through a multiplying glass, appears 
to have been increased from one to many. Plutarch 
25* 



294 THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 

ennmerates no fewer than five great floods ; and Plato 
makes his Egyptian priest describe the Greek deluges as 
oft repeated and numerous. There was the flood of Deu- 
calion, the flood oi Ogyges, and several other floods; and 
no little time and learning have been wasted in attempt- 
ing to fix their several periods. But, lying far within the 
mythologic ages, — the last of them to which any deter- 
mining circumstances are attached, in the days of that 
Prometheus who stole fire from heaven, and was chained 
by Jupiter to Mount Caucasus, — it appears greatly more 
probable that the traditions respecting them should be 
the mere repeated and re-repeated echoes of one signal 
event, than that many wdde-spread and destructive floods 
should have taken place in the obscure, fabulous ages of 
Grecian story, while not one such flood has happened 
during its two thousand five hundred years of authentic 
history. Nor is it difficult to conceive how such repeti- 
tions of the original tradition should have taken place. 
The traditions of the same event preserved by tribes liv- 
ing in even the same tract of country come in course 
of time considerably to difler from each other in their 
adjuncts and circumstances; those, for instance, of the 
various tribes of the Orinoco do so ; and should these 
tribes come to be fused ultimately into one nation, noth- 
ing seems more probable than that their varying editions, 
instead of being also fused together, should remain dis- 
tinct, as the recollections of separate and independent 
catastrophes. And thus the several deluges of Grecian 
mythology may in reality testify, not to the occurrence 
of several floods, but to the existence merely of several 
independent tribes, among whom the one great tradition 
has been so altered and modified ere they came to possess 
a common literature, that when at length they became 
Udlful enough to place it on record, it appeared to them 



THE NO ACHI AN DELUGE. 295 

not as one, but as many. The admirable reflection of 
Humboldt suggested by the South American traditions 
seems, incidentally at least, to bear out this view. " Those 
ancient traditions of the human race," he says, " which we 
find dispersed over the whole surface of the globe, like the 
relics of a vast shipwreck, are highly interesting in the 
[philosophical study of our own species. How many dif- 
jferent tongues belonging to branches that appear totally 
distinct transmit to "s the same facts! The traditions 
concerning races that have been destroyed, and the re- 
newal of nature, scarcely vary in reality, though every 
nation gives them a local coloring. In the great conti- 
nents, as in the smallest islands of the Pacific Ocean, it 
is always on the loftiest and nearest mountain that the 
remains of the human race have been saved; and this 
event appears the more recent in proportion as the nations 
are uncultivated, and as the knowledge they have of their 
own existence has no very remote date." And it seems at 
least not improbable, that the several traditions of appar- 
ently special deluges, — deluges each with its OA\m set of 
circumstances, and from which the progenitors of one 
nation were saved on a hill-top, those of another on a 
raft, and those of yet another in an ark or canoe, and 
which in one instance destroyed only giants, and had in 
another the loss Avhich they occasioned repaired by date- 
stones, and in yet another by stones of the earth, — should 
come to be regarded among a people composed of various 
tribes, and but little accustomed to sift the evidence on 
which they founded, rather as all diverse narratives of 
diverse events, than as in reality but varied accounts of 
one and the same tremendous catastrophe. 

Taking it for granted, then, that the several Greek 
traditions refer to but one great event, let us accept that 



296 THE NOACniAN DELUGE. 

which records what is known as the flood of Deucalion, 
as more adequately representative of the general type of 
its class, especially in the edition given by Lucian (in his 
work "De Dea Syria"), than any of the others. "The 
present world," says this writer, "is peopled from the 
sons of Deucalion, In respect to the former brood, they 
were men of violence, and lawless in their dealings ; they 
regarded not oaths, nor observed the rites of hospitality, 
nor showed mercy to those who sued for it. On this 
account they were doomed to destruction ; and for this 
purpose there was a mighty eruption of water from the 
earth, attended with heavy showers from above, so that 
the rivers swelled and the sea overflowed, till the whole 
earth was covered with a flood, and all flesh drowned. 
Deucalion alone was preserved, to people the world. This 
mercy was shown him on account of his justice and piety. 
His preservation was efiected in this manner: — He put 
all his family, both his sons and their wives, into a vast 
ark which he had provided, and he then went into it him- 
self. At the same time, animals of every species, — boars^ 
horses, lions, serpents, — whatever lived upon the face of 
the earth, — followed him by pairs ; all which he received 
into the ark, and experienced no evil from them." Such 
is the tradition of Deucalion, as preserved by Lucian. It 
is added by his contemporary Plutarch, that " Deucalion, 
as his voyage was drawing to a close, sent out a dove, 
which coming in a short time back to him, indicated that 
the waters still covered the earth ; but which on a second 
occasion failed to return ; or, as some say, returned to 
him with mud-stained feet, and thus intimated the abate- 
m^ent of the flood." It cannot, I think, be rationally 
doubted that we have in this ancient legend one other 
tradition of the Noachian Deluge. Even as related by 



THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 297 

Ovid, with all the license of the poet, we find in it the 
great leading traits that indicate its parentage. I quote 
from the vigorous translation of Dryden. 

"Impetuous rain descends; 
Nor from his patrimonial heaven alone 
Is Jove content to pour his vengeance down; 
But from his brother of the seas he craves 
To help him with auxiliary waves. 
Then with his mace the monarch struck the ground; 
With inward trembling earth received the wound. 
And rising streams a ready passage found. 
Now seas and earth were in confusion lost, — 
A world of waters, and without a coast. 
A mountain of tremendous height there stands 
Betwixt the Athenian and Boeotian lands : 
Parnassus is its name, whose forky rise 
Mounts through the clouds, and mates the lofty i^es. 
High on the summit of this dubious cliff, 
Deucalion, wafting, moored his little skiff: 
He, with his wife, were only left behind 
Of perished man; they two were human kind: 
The most upright of mortal men was he, — 
The most serene and holy woman she." 

Such are some of the traditions of that great catastrophe 
which overtook the human family in its infancy, and made 
so deep an impression on the memories of the few awe- 
struck survivors, that the race never forgot it. Ere the 
dispersal of the family it would have of course existed as 
but one unique recollection, — a single reflection on the 
face of an unbroken mirror. But the mirror has since 
been shattered into a thousand pieces ; and we now find 
the object, originally but one, pictured in each broken 
fragment, with various degrees of distinctness, according 
to the various degrees of injury received by the reflecting 
medium. Picture^ too, scarce less certainly than language 
spoken and written, testifies to the wide extent of the 



298 



THE NOACHIAiT DELUGE. 



tradition. Its symbols are found stamped on coins of old 
classical Greece ; they have been traced amid the ancient 
hieroglyphics of Egypt, recognized in the sculptured caves 
of Hindustan, and detected even in the far west, among 
the picture writings of Mexico. The several glyphic rep- 
resentatives of the tradition bear, like its various written 
or oral editions, a considerable resemblance to each other.' 
Even in the rude paintmgs of the old Mexican, the same 
leading idea may be traced as in the classic sculpture of 
the Greek. On what is known to antiquaries as the Apa- 
msean medal, struck during the reign of Philip the elder, 
we find the^ familiar name of Noe inscribed on a floating 

Fi^. 109. 




APAM^AN MEDAL. 



chest or ark, within which a man and woman are seen 
seated, and to which a bird on the wing is represented as 
And in an ancient Mexican painting, 



bearing a branch.* 



* As was common in Bible illustrations published in our own country a 
century and a half ago, the old Greek artist has introduced into his medal 
two points of time. Two of the figures represent Noe and his wife quit- 
ting the ark; while the other two exhibit them as seated within it. An 
English print of the death of Abel, now before me, which dates a little 
after the times of the Revolution, shows, on the same principle, the tAvo 
brothers, represented by four figures, — two of these quietly oflFering up 
their respective sacrifices in the background, and the other two grappling 
In deadly warfare in front. 



THE NOACHIAN DELUGE 



299 



figured by Humboldt, " the man and woman who survived 
the age of water" are shown shnilarly mclosed in a leaf- 
tufted box, or hollow trunk of a tree; while a gigantic 
female, — Matalcueje, the goddess of water, — is seen pour- 
ing down her floods around them, and upon an over- 
whelmed human figure, representative apparently of tlie 
victims of the catastrophe. All is classical in the forms 
of the one representation, and uncouth in those of the 

Fig. 110. 




OLD MEXICAN PICTURE. 

{Humboldt.) 



other. They bear the same sort of artistic relation to 
each other that the rude Tamanac tradition bears, in a 
literary point of view, to the well constructed story and 
elegant verse of Ovid ; but they are charged apparently 
with the same meaning, and shadow forth the same event. 

The tradition of the Flood may, I repeat, be properly 
regarded as universal; seeing there is scarce any consid- 
erable race of man among which, in some of its many 
forms, it is not to be found. Xow, it has been argued 
by some of the older theologians, with a not very cogent 
logic, that the universality of the tradition estabUshes the 



300 THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 

universality of the Flood, — that where the tradition is to 
he founds the Flood 'inust have heen ^ — an argument which 
would have force if it could also be shown that each tribe 
had had its own Noah, saved by ark, raft, or canoe, or on 
some tall mountain summit, in the region in which his 
descendants continued to reside ; but of no force whatever 
if the Noah of the race was but one, and if the scene of 
his danger and deliverance was restricted, as of necessity 
it must h«ave been in that case, to a single locality. Fur- 
ther, if, as we believe, there was but one Noah, — if, 
according to the Scriptural account, condensed into a sin- 
gle sentence by the Apostle, only " eight souls" were saved 
in the great catastrophe of the race, — there could have 
existed no human testimony to determine whether the 
exterminating deluge that occasioned their destruction was 
a universal deluge, or merely a partial one. It could not 
be known by men shut up in an ark, nor even though from 
a mast top they could have swept the horizon with a tele- 
scope, whether the waters that spread out on every side of 
them, covering the old familiar mountains, and occupying 
the entire range of their vision, extended all around the 
globe, or found their limits some eight or ten hundred 
miles away. The point is one respecting which, as cer- 
tainly as respecting the creation of the world itself, or of 
the world's inhabitants, there could have existed no human 
witness-bearing: contemporary man, left to the unassisted 
evidence of his senses, must of necessity have been igno- 
rant of the extent of the deluge. True, what man could 
never have known of himself, God could have told him, 
and in many cases has told him ; but then, God's revela- 
tions have in most instances been made to effect exclusively 
moral purposes ; and we know that those who liave peril- 
ously held that, along with the moral facts, definite physi- 
cal facts, geographic, geologic, or astronomical, liad also 



I 



THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 301 

been imparted, have almost invariably found themselves 
involved in monstrous error. And in this matter of the 
Flood, though it be a fact of great moral significancy that 
God in an early period of the human history destroyed the 
whole race for their wickedness, — all save one just man 
and his family, — it is not in the least a matter of moral 
significancy whether or no the deluge by which the judg- , 

ment was effected covered not only the parts of the earth 
occupied by man at the time, but extended also to Terra 
del Fuego, Tahiti, and the Falkland Islands. In fine, 
though the question whether the Noachian deluge was 
universal, or merely partial, is an interesting question in 
physics, it is in no higher degree a moral one than those 
questions which relate to the right figure or age of the 
earth, or to the true motions of the heavenly bodies. And 
it will be found that the only passages in Scripture which 
refer to this strictly physical subject, instead of determin- 
ing the geographic extent of the Flood, serve only to raise 
a question regarding their own extent of meaning. 

It is known to all students of the sacred writings, that 
there is a numerous class of i^assages in both the Old and 
Kew Testaments in which, by a sort of metonymy common 
in the East, a considerable j^art is spoken of as the whole, 
though in reality often greatly less than a moiety of the 
whole. Of this class are the j^assages in which it is said, 
that on the day of Pentecost there were Jews assembled ysc^~ 
at Jerusalem "out of every nation under heaven;^'' "that 
the gospel was preached to every creature under heaven;'''* 
that the Queen of Sheba came to hear the wisdom of 
Solomon from the '■''uttermost parts of the earth;'''' that'*'-^ 
God put the dread and fear of the children of Israel upon 
the nations that were '■'• under the whole heaven;^'' and 
that ''^ all countries came into Egypt to Joseph to buy 
corn." And of course the universally admitted existence 
26 



o02 THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 

of such a class of passages, in whicli words are not to be 
accepted in their rigidly literal meanings, but with certain 
great modifications, renders the task of determining and 
distinguishing such passages from others in which the 
meaning is definite and strict, not only legitimate, but also 
laudable ; and justifies us in inquiring whether those pas- 
sages descriptive of the Flood or its effects, in which it is 
said that the " waters prevailed exceedingly on the earth," 
so that '•''all the high hills that were under the whole 
heavens were covered," or that " all flesh died that moved 
upon the earth," belong to their number or no. There are 
some instances in which the Scriptures themselves reveal 
the character and limit the meaning of the metonymic 
passages. They do so with respect to the passage already 
quoted regarding the stranger Jews assembled in Jerusa- 
lem at the Pentecostal feast, — "out of every nation under 
heaven." For further on we read that these Jews had 
come from but the various countries extending around 
Judea, as far as Italy on the one hand, and the Persian 
Gulf on the other; — an area large, indeed, but scarce 
equal to a one fiftieth part of the earth's surface. But there 
is no such explanation given to limit or restrict most of the 
other passages ; the modifying element must be sought for 
outside the sacred volume, — in ancient history or ancient 
geography. The reader must, for instance, acquaint him- 
self with the progress of discovery in early ages, or the 
boundaries of the Roman Empire under the first Caesars, 
ere he can form a probable conjecture regarding the extent 
of that " all the earth " which sought the presence of Solo- 
mon, or a correct estimate respecting the limits of that 
" all the world " which Caesar Augustus could have taxed. 
And to this last class, which fail to explain themselves, the 
passages respecting the Flood evidently belong. Like the 
passages cited, and, with these, almost all the texts of 



THE NO AC HI AX DELUGE. S03 

Scripture in which questions of physical science are in- 
volved, the Umiting, modifying, explaining facts and cir- 
cumstances must be sought for in that outside region of 
secular research, historic and scientific, fi'om which of late 
years so much valuable biblical illustration has been de- 
rived, and with which it is so imperatively the duty of the 
Church to keep up an acquaintance at least as close and 
intimate as that maintained with it by her gainsayers and 
assailants. 

That the Noachian deluge might have been but partial, 
not universal, was held, let me here remark, by distin- 
guished theologians in our own country, at least as early as 
the seventeenth century. It was held, for instance, by the 
learned biblical commentator, old Matthew Poole, whom we 
find saying, in his S}Tiopsis on Genesis, that " it is not to 
be suj^posed that the entire globe of the earth was covered 
with water;" for "where," he adds, "was the need of 
overwhelming those regions in which there were no human 
beings?" It was held also by that distinguished Protes- 
tant churchman of the reign of Charles II., Bishop Stilling- 
fleet, whom Principal Cunningham of Edinburgh well 
describes, in Ids 'elaborate edition of the Bishoj^'s work, 
" The Doctrines and Practices of the Church of Rome," as 
a divine of "great talents and prodigious learning." "I 
cannot see," says the Bishop, in his "Origines Sacra," "any 
urgent necessity from the Scrij^tures to assert that the 
Flood did spread over all the surface of the earth. That 
all mankind, those in the ark excepted, were destroyed by 
it, is most certain, according to the Scriptures. The Flood 
was universal as to mankind ; but from thence follows no 
necessity at all of asserting the universality of it as to the 
globe of the earth, unless it be sufficiently proved that the 
whole earth was peopled before the Flood, which I despair 
of ever seeing proved." It was not, however, until the 



L^„^ 



f 



304 THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 

comparatively recent times in which the belief entertained 
by Poole and Stillingfleet was adopted and enforced by 
writers such as Dr. Pye Smith, and Professor Hitchcock 
of the United States, that there was any show of argument 
displayed against the theory of a partial deluge which 
would now be deemed worthy of consideration. And 
these modern objections may be found ingeniously arrayed 
by the late Dr. John Kitto, in his "Daily Bible Illus- 
trations," published only six years ago (in 1850), and by 
the learned Dr. William Hamilton of Mobile, in his "Friend 
of Moses," published in 1852. Both these writers, how- 
ever, virtually agree with their opjDonents in holding that 
the strict meanmg of the terms employed by Moses in 
describing the deluge is to be determined on consid- 
erations apart from the mere philological ones. After 
marshalling his objections to the theory of a local flood. 
Dr. Kitto goes on to say, "We yield our judgment to 
what appears to us the force of these arguments as to the 
meaning of Scripture;" and we find Dr. Hamilton pre- 
facing his objections as follows: — "Were the mere uni- 
versality of some of the terms employed in the Mosaic 
narrative the sole ground of objection to the hypothesis of 
a local inundation only in the days of ISToah, that hypothe- 
sis might perhaps be deemed admissible. But there are," 
he adds, " other and more serious difficulties attending it." 
Let us, then, briefly examine these supposed difficulties and 
objections ; and as they have been better and more amply 
stated by Dr. Kitto than by any other writer with whom I 
am acquainted, — for Dr. Hamilton takes up rather the 
arguments in favor of a universal, than the objections 
against a merely i)artial flood, — let us take them as they 
occur in his writings, especially in the excellent Avork now 
before me, — his "Daily Bible Illustrations." It will scarce 
be suspected that such an accomplished writei', who did so 



THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 305 

much for Biblical Illustration, and whose admirable Pic- 
torial Bible formed, with but four works more, what 
Chalmers used to term with peculiar emphasis his " Biblical 
Library," * would do injustice to any cause, or any line of 
argument which he adopted, if it was in reahty a good and 
sound one. 

It may be well, however, not to test too rigidly the 
value of the remark, — meant to be at least of the nature 
of argument, — when we find him saying that "a plain 
man sitting down to read the Scripture account of the 
deluge would have no doubt of its universality." Perhaps 
not. But it is at least equally certain, that plain men who 
set themselves to deduce from Scripture the figure of the 
planet we inhabit had as Httle doubt, until corrected by the 
geographer, that the earth was a great plane, — not a 
sphere ; that plain men who set themselves to acquire fi'om 
Scripture some notion of the planetary motions had no 
doubt, in the same way, until corrected by the astronomer, 
that it was the earth that rested, and the sun that moved 
round it ; and that plain men who have sought to deter- 
mine from Scripture the age of the earth have had no 
doubt, until corrected by the geologist, that it was at most 
not much more than six thousand years old. In fine, when 
plain men, who, according to Cow^er, "know, and know 
no more, their Bible true," have in perhaj^s every instance 
learned from it what it was in reahty intended to teach, — 

*"Iii preparing the 'Horse Biblical Quotidianae/ he [Dr. Chalmers] 
had beside him, for use and reference, the Concordance, the Pictorial 
Bible, Poole's Sjoiopsis, Henry's Commentary, and Robertson's Researches 
in Palestine, These constituted what he called his Biblical Library. 
* There,' said he to a friend, pointing, as he spoke, to the above named 
volumes as they lay together on his library table, with a volume of the 
' Quotidianae,' in which he had just been writing, lying open beside them, 
— ' these are the books I use : all that is Biblical is there.' "—Dr. Hanna's 
Preface to "Daily Scripture Headinas." 
20* 



306 THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 

the way of salvation, — it seems scarce less certain, that in 
every instance in which they have sought to deduce from 
it what it was not intended to teach, — the truths of physi- 
cal science, — they have fallen into extravagant error. 
And as any question which, bearing, not on the punitory 
^ extent and ethical consequences of the Flood, but merely 
on its geographic limits and natural effects, is not a moral, 
but a purely physical question, it would be but a fair pre- 
sumption, founded on the almost invariable experience of 
ages, that the deductions from Scripture of the "plain 
men " regarding it would be, not true, but false deductions. 
Of apparently not more real weight and importance is the 
doctor's further remark, that there seems, after all, to be a 
marked difference between the terms in which the univer- 
sality of the deluge is spoken of, and the terms employed 
in those admittedly metonymic passages in which the whole 
is substituted for a part. "What limitation," he asks, 
"can we assign to such a phrase as this: — *all the high 
hills that were under the whole heavens were covered ? ' 
If here the phrase had been, ' upon the face of the whole 
earth,' we should have been told that 'the whole earth' 
had sometimes the meaning of ' the whole land ; ' but, as 
if designedly to obviate such a limitation of meaning, we 
have here the largest phrase of universality which the 
language of man affords, — 'under the whole heavens!'" 
So far Dr. Kitto. But his argument seems to be not more 
Valuable in this case than in the other. It was upon the 
nations that were "under the _whole heavens" that 
Deity represented himself as putting the fear and dread of 
the children of Israel ; but he would be certainly a very 
"plain man" who would infer from the universality of a 
passage so evidently metonymic, that that fear extended to 
the people of Japan on the one hand, or to the Red Indians 
of the Rocky Mountains on the other. The phrase " wider 



THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 307 

the whole heavens " seems to be but coextensive m mean- 
ing with the plirase " upon the face of the whole eaith." 
The " whole earth " is evidently tantamount to the whole 
terrestrial floor, — the "whole heavens," to the whole 
celestial roof that arches over it; and on what jfl-inciple 
the whole terrestrial floor is to be deemed less extensive 
than the floor under the whole celestial roof, really does 
not appear. Further, nothing can be more certain than 
that both the phrases contrasted by Dr. Kitto are equally 
employed in the metonymic form. 

When, however, the doctor passes to argument based 
upon natural science, we find what he adduces worthy of 
our attention, were it but for the inquiries which it sug- 
gests. " If the deluge were but local," we find hin^ saying, 
"what was the need of taking birds into the ark; and 
among them birds so widely diffused as the raven and the 
dove? A deluge which could overspread the region which 
these birds inhabit could hardly have been less than uni- 
versal. If the deluge were local, and all the birds of these 
kinds in that district perished, — though we should think 
they might have fled to the uninundated regions, — it 
would have been useless to encumber the ark with them, 
seeing that the birds of the same species which survived 
in the lands not overflowed would speedily replenish the 
inundated tract as soon as the waters subsided." It will 
be found that the reasoning here is mainly based upon an 
error in natural science, into which even naturalists of the 
last century, such as Buffon, not unfrequently fell, and 
which was almost universal among the earlier voyagers 
and travellers, — the error of confounding as identical the 
merely allied birds and beasts of distant countries, and of 
thus assigning to species wide areas in creation which in 
reality they do not occupy. The grouse, for instance, is a 
widely spread genus, or rather family ; for it consists of 



308 THE XOACIIIAN DELUGE. 

more genera than one. It is so extensively present over 
the northern hemisphere, that Siberia, IS'orway, Iceland, 
and [North America, have all their grouse, — the latter 
continent, indeed, from five to eight different kinds; and 
yet so* restricted are some of the species of which they 
consist, that, were the British islands to be submerged, one 
of the best known of the femily, — the red grouse, or moor- 
fowl {Lagopus ScoUcus)^ — would disappear from creation. 
This bird, which, rated at its money value, is one of the 
most important in Europe, — for the barren moors which 
it frequents in the Highlands of Scotland alone are let 
every season almost entirely for its sake for hundreds of 
thousands of pounds, — is exclusively a British bird ; and, 
unless f>j miracle a new migratory instinct were given to 
It, a complete submersion of the British islands would 
secure its destruction. If the submergence amounted to 
but a few hundred miles in lateral extent, the moor-fowl 
would to a certainty not seek the distant uninundated land. 
Nor is it at all to be inferred, that in a merely local but 
wide spread deluge, birds occupying a more extensive area 
than that overspread by the Flood Avould, according to 
Dr. Kitto, " speedily replenish the inundated tract as soon 
as the waters had subsided." The statement must have 
been hazarded in ignorance of the peculiar habits of many 
of the non-migratory birds. Up till about the middle of 
the last century, the capercailzie, or great cock of the 
woods, was a native of Scotland. It was exterminated, 
however, about the time of the last Rebellion, or not long 
after : the last specimen seen among the pine forests of 
Strathspey was killed, it is said, in the year 1745 : the last 
specimen seen among the Avoods of Strathglass survived till 
the year 1760. Pennant relates that he saw in 1769 a 
specimen, i3robably a stuffed one, that had been killed 
shortly before in the neighborhood of Inverness. But from 



THE NOACIIIAN DELUGE. 309 

at least that time the species disappeared from the British 
islands ; and, though it continued to exist in Korway, did 
not "replenish the tracts fromAvhich it had been extirpated." 
The late Marquis of Breadalbane was at no small cost and 
trouble in re-mtroducing the species, and to some extent 
he succeeded; but the capercailzie is, I understand, still 
restricted to the Breadalbane woods. I have seen the 
golden eagle annihilated as a species in more than one 
district of the north of Scotland ; nor, though it still exists 
in other parts of the kingdom, and is comparatively com- 
mon among the mountains of Norway, have I known it in 
any instance to spreau anew over the tracts from which it 
had been extirpated. So much for the general reasonings 
of Dr. Kitto. Further, we find him statmg, that a deluge 
which could overspread the region inhabited by birds so 
widely diiFused as the raven and the dove, could hardly 
have been less than universal. The doctor, however, ought 
to have known that the dove is a family^ not a species. All 
the American species of doves, for example, differ from the 
six European species, three of which are to be found in Scot- 
land. Of even the American passenger pigeons {Ectopistes 
migratoria)^ which occur in such numbers in their native 
country as actually to eclipse, during their migratory flights, 
the light of day, only a single straggler, — the one whose 
chance visit has been recorded by Dr. Fleming, — seems to 
have been ever seen in Britain. And the East has also its 
own peculiar species, unknown to Europe. The golden- 
green pigeons and the great crowned pigeons of the Indian 
isles are never seen in northern and western latitudes, save 
in stuffed specimens in a museum. The Vinago pigeons, 
with their vividly bright plumes, though they exist in 
several species, are all restricted to the woods of the torrid 
zone. Even the collared dove of Africa and the Levant 
rarely visits, and then only as a straggler, the western 



310 THE NOACIIIAN DELUGE. 

and northern parts of Europe. The blue-capped turteline 
pigeon is restricted, as a sj^ecies, to the island of Celebes ; 
the blue and green turteUne pigeon is a native of New- 
Guinea ; the Cape turtle occurs in but the southern parts 
of Africa ; the Nicobar ground pigeon in but the Indian 
Archipelago; the magnificent fruit pigeon in the eastern 
parts of Australia; and the crowned goura pigeon, the 
giant of its family, in the Molucca Islands. No single 
species of dove seems to be so widely spread but that it 
might be exterminated in a merely partial deluge ; and of 
course conjecture may in vain weary itself in striving to 
determine what that particular species was which Noah 
sent forth as a messenger from the ark, or in inquiring 
what was the extent of the area which it occupied ? The 
common raven is more widely spread than any single 
species of pigeon. Even the raven, however, seems re- 
stricted to the northern hemisphere. India and Southern 
Africa have both their ravens ; but the species differ from 
each other, and from the widely spread northern one. It 
is a question whether even the pied raven of the Faroe 
Isles be not a distinct bird from the black raven of our own 
country : if not an independent species, it is at least a very 
remarkable variety. Further, when extirpated in a dis- 
trict, it is found that, as in the case of the capercailzie and 
the golden eagle, the neighboring regions in which the 
raven continues to exist fail for ages to furnish a fresh 
supply. There are counties in England in which the raven 
is now never seen ; and I am acquainted with a district in 
the north of Scotland from which, when a pair that were 
known to breed for more than a century in a tall cliff were 
destroyed by the fowler, the species disappeared. * Such, 

* The raven is said to live for more than a hundred years. I am, how- 
ever, not prepared to say that it was the same pair of birds that-used. 



THE NOACIIIAN DELUGE. 311 

when examined, are the arguments drawn hy Dr. Kitto 
from natural science ; nor is he in any degree happier when 
he resorts to arguments more restrictedly physical. " If," 
we find him saying, " the waters of the Deluge rose fifteen 
cubits above all the mountains of the countries which the 
raven and the dove inhabit, the level must have been high 
^enough to give universality to the Deluge?'' The only point 
here not already dealt with, — for I have just shown that 
certain species of the dove and the raven might have of 
necessity been inmates of the ark, though the Flood had 
been only a partial one, — is that which refers to the sub- 
mergence of the hills over at least an extensive tract, and 
to the inference, evident in the passage, that if lofty moun- 
tains were covered in one portion of the globe, mountains 
of similar altitude must have been equally covered in every 
other portion of it. 

The inference here seems to be founded on a common 
but altogether mistaken view of some of the grandest opera- 
tions of nature with which modern science has brought us 
acquainted. It has been well remarked, that when two 
opposing explanations of extraordinary natural phenomena 
are given, — one of a simple and seemingly common sense 
character, the other complex and apparently absurd, — it 
is almost always safer to adopt the apparently absurd than 
the seemingly common sense one. Dr. Kitto's "plain man," 
yielding to the dictates of what he would deem common 
sense, — which, of course, in questions of natural science is 
tantamount to common nonsense, — would be sure to go 
WTong. And we find the remark not inaptly illustrated by 
the now well established fact, that while the medium level 
of the ocean is one of the most fixed lines in nature, the 

year after year, to build on the same rock-shelf among the precipices of 
Navity, from the times of my great-grandfather's boyhood to those of 
my own. 



312 THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 

level of the great continents, with their table-lands and 
mountains, is an ever fluctuating line. It may seem strange 
that land should be less stable than water. We see the 
tide rising and falling twice every twenty-four hours, and 
the rock ever remaining in its place; — we speak of the 
fixed earth and the unstable sea. And yet, while we have 
no evidence whatever that the sea level has changed during 
at least the ages of the Tertiary formations, and absolutely 
know that it could not have varied more than a few yards, 
or at most a few fathoms, we have direct evidence that 
during that time great mountain chains, many thousand 
feet in height, such as the Alps, have arisen from the 
bottom of the ocean, and that great continents have sunk 
beneath it and disappeared. The larger part of northern 
Europe and America have been covered by the sea since 
our present group of shells began to exist; and it seems 
not improbable that the lower portion of the valley of the 
Jordan was depressed to its present low level of thirteen 
hundred feet beneath the Mediterranean since the times of 
the deluge. On several parts of the coasts of Britain and 
Ireland the voyager can look down through the clear sea, 
in depths to which the tide never falls, on the remains of 
submerged forests ; and it is a demonstrable fact, that even 
during the present age there are certain extensive tracts 
of land which have sunk beneath the sea level, while certain 
other extensive tracts have been elevated over it. In 1819, 
a wide expanse of country in the delta of the Indus, con- 
taining fiilly two thousand square miles of flat meadow, 
was converted by a sudden depression of the land, accom- 
panied by an earthquake, into an inland sea ; and the tower 
of a small fort, which occupied nearly the middle of the 
sunken area, and on which many of the inhabitants of a 
neighboring village succeeded in saving themselves, may 
still be seen raising its shattered head over the surface, — 



•:^. 



THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 313 

the only object visible in a waste of waters of which the 
eye fails to determine the extent. About three years after 
this event, a tract of country, interposed between the foot 
of the Andes and the Pacific, more than equal in area to all 
Great Britain, was elevated from two to seven feet over 
its former level, and rocks laid bare in the sea, which the 
pilots and fishermen of the coast had never before seen. 
On the Indian coast the sea seemed to be rising at nearly 
the same time when it appeared to be falling on the Ameri- 
can one ; and on the latter such was the actual impression 
entertained by the people. It is stated by Sir Charles 
LyeU, in his "Elements," that he was informed by Mr. 
Cruickshanks, an Enghsh botanist who resided in Chili at 
the time, " that it was the general belief of the fishermen 
and inhabitants, not that the land had risen, but that the 
ocean had permanently retreated." But if it had retreated 
from the ChiUan shore, how could it have risen on the 
Indian one ? In Hke manner the sea appears to be receding 
from the north-eastern shores of Sweden at the rate of 
nearly four vertical feet in the century; while it seems 
to be advancing on the western coasts of Greenland at 
apparently a rate more considerable, though there the ratio 
of its rise has not been marked with equal care. It seems 
to be rising on even the Swedish province of Scania ; while 
aU the time, however, the actual motion, — upwards in one 
region, downwards in another, — is in the solid earth, — 
not in the unstable water, which merely serves as a sort 
of hydrostatic levels to indicate this fact of subsidence or 
elevation in the land. And of course all the reasoning, 
founded on mere appearances, that would reverse the pro- 
cess by assigning permanency to the level of the land, 
and fluctuation to that of the sea, would lead to inevitable 
error. 

Let us, for the illustration's sake, suppose that the British 
27 



314 THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 

islands had been the scene of the Deluge ; and that it had 
been occasioned by a gradual depression in the earth's 
surface of about fifteen hundred miles in length, a thousand 
miles in breadth, five thousand feet in depth in its centre, 
and which gradually trended all around towards the sides. 
Such a depression would form a scarce appreciable inequality 
on the surface of even a three feet globe ; in a twelve inch 
globe it might be represented by the abrasion of a small 
patch of the varnish ; nor would it have in nature one sixth 
the depth, or one sixteenth the area, of the bed of the 
Atlantic Ocean. Let us suppose further, that it had been 
produced by an equable sinking of the surface, prolonged 
for forty days at the rate of one hundred and twenty-five 
feet per day, — a motion not equal to that of the minute- 
hand of a clock whose dial plate measures two feet in 
diameter. Further, let us suppose that a thoroughly intel- 
ligent man, — let us say Dr. Kitto himself, — secure from 
all personal danger in an ark perched on some such com- 
manding eminence as Arthur's Seat, had been a witness of 
the catastrophe; and that, instead of having merely to 
reason respecting it after the lapse of more than four 
thousand years, he had been enabled to bear testimony 
regarding it from the evidence of his senses. In the first 
place, let me remark that the sinking or downward motion 
of the earth's crust would be altogether inaj^preciable by 
sense ; in the next, that the depression, even when it had 
reached its acme, would in no sensible degree affect the 
contour of surrounding objects. Even at the end of the 
forty days, when the five thousand feet of depression had 
been reached, the gradient of declination across the sunken 
area would not exceed ten feet per mile, and across the 
larger diameter would amount to but six feet eight inches 
per mile. Of com'se, at the end of the twentieth day the 
gradients would be represented by but one half these sums, 



THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 315 

and would be altogether inappreciable in the landscape; 
the hUls would seem quite as high as before, and the valleys 
not more profound. The only sensible sign felt or visible 
of what was taking place would be simply a persistent 
rising of the sea at somewhat less than twice its rate of 
flow during stream tides. Ocean, as if forgetful of its 
ancient bounds, would continue to encroach upon the land. 
On the second day the greater part of what is now the site 
of Edinburgh would be covered ; on the seventh day the 
tide would have reached the vessel perched on the top of 
the hill now known as Arthur's Seat ; on the sixteenth day 
the highest peak of the Pentlands would have disappeared ; 
and in nine days more the distant summit of Ben Lomond. 
From the roof of the slowly drifting ark nothing would 
then have appeared save a shoreless ocean. But it would 
have taken yet other eleven days ere the proud crest of 
Ben Nevis, the highest land in the British islands, would 
have been submerged ; and the eve of the fortieth day 
would have seen it covered by little more than five hundred 
feet of water. An actual witness, in such circumstances, 
however intelligent, could have but testified to the per- 
sistent rise of the sea, accompanied mayhap by rain and 
tempest ; he could but tell how that for many days together 
it had been flood without ebb, as if the fountains of the 
great deep had been broken up ; and that at length he was 
encompassed by what seemed a shoreless ocean. But he 
would certainly depart perilously from his position as a 
witness-bearer, were he to argue, that when his ark had 
begun to float on a hill eight hundred feet in height, all 
hills upon the surface of the globe of a corresponding alti- 
tude must have been also covered ; or that, from what was 
in reality but a local depression, a universal deluge might 
be legitimately inferred. His error would be of the same 
nature (though of course immensely greater) as that of the 



316 THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 

native of Chili who held, that because the ocean hri<l 
retreated from the coasts of his own country, it had of 
necessity also retreated from the delta of the Indus ; or as 
that of the inhabitant of Cutch who held, that as the sea 
had risen high over his native districts, it had also of neces- 
sity overflowed the coasts of Chili and Aracan. 

Dr. Kitto brings forward but one other objection to a 
Flood only partial, and that the one virtually disposed of 
by Bishop Stillingfleet in the terminal half of a short sen- 
tence. The Bishop "despaired," as he well might, "of 
ever seeing it proved that the whole earth had been peo- 
pled before the Deluge." "It has been much urged of 
late," says Dr. Kitto, " that the Deluge was not universal, 
but was confined to a particular region, which man inhab- 
ited. It may be freely admitted that, seeing the object of 
the Flood was to drown mankind, there was no need that 
it should extend beyond the region of man's habitation. 
But this theory necessarily assigns to the world before the 
Flood a lower population, and a more limited extension of 
it, than we are prepared to concede." He then goes on to 
argue, that, as the species increased very rapidly immedi- 
ately after the Deluge, it must have increased in a ratio at 
least equally rapid before that catastrophe took place. But 
how gratuitous the assumption! It would be quite as 
safe to infer, that as the human race multiplied greatly in 
Ireland during the first half of the present century, it 
must have also multiplied greatly in Italy, a much finer 
country, during the first half of the fifth century, or 
in the wealthier portions of Kurdistan during the first 
half of the thirteenth. Ere applying, however, the Irish 
ratio of increase to either the Italy of thirteen hundred 
years ago, or to the Kurdistan of five hundred years ago, 
it would surely be necessary to take into account the im- 
portant fact, that these were the ages of Zingis Khan and 



THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 317 

of Attila ; of Zingis Khan, who, on possessmg himself of 
the three capitals of the one country, coolly butchered four 
millions three hundred and forty-seven thousand persons, 
their inhabitants; and of that Attila, "the scourge of 
God," who used to say, more especially in reference to the 
other country, that " wherever his horse-hoofs had once ^ 
trod, the grass never afterwards grew," and before whose 
ravages the human race seemed melting away. The terms 
in which the great wickedness of the antediluvians is de- 
scribed indicate a period of violence and outrage; — the 
age which preceded the Flood was an age of " giants" and 
of " mighty men," and of " men of renown," — forgotten 
Attilas, Alarics, and Zingis Khans, mayhap, — " giants of 
mighty bone and bold emprise," who became famous for 
their ''infinite manslaughter," and the thousands whom 
they destroyed. Such is decidedly the view which the 
brief Scriptural description suggested to the poets; and 
certainly, when a question comes to be one of guess work, 
no other class of persons guess half so sagaciously as they. 
It has not unfrequently occurred to me, — and in a ques- 
lion of this kind one suggestion may be quite as admissible 
as another, — that the Deluge may have been more a visi- 
tation of mercy to the race than of judgment. Even in 
our own times, as happened in New Zealand during the 
present century, and in Tahiti about the close of the last, 
tribes restricted to one tract of country, when seized by 
the madness of conquest, have narrowly escaped extermi- 
nation. We know that in some instances better liave been 
destroyed by worse races, — that the more refined have at 
times yielded to the more barbarous, — yielded so entirely, 
that all that survived of vast populations and a compar- 
atively high civilization have been broken temples, and 
great burial mounds locked up in the sohtudes of deep 
forests; and further, that whole peoples, exhausted by 
27* 



318 THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 

their vices, have sunk into such a state of depression an<l 
decline, that, unable any longer to supply the inevitaljle 
waste of nature, they have dropt into extinction. And 
such may have been the condition of the human race 
during that period of portentous evil and violence which 
preceded the deluge. We know that the good came at 
length to be restricted to a single family; and even the 
evil, instead of being numbered, as now, by hundreds of 
millions, may have been comprised in a few thousands, 
or at most a few hundred thousands, that were becoming 
fewer every year, from the indulgence of fierce and evil 
passions, in a time of outrage and violence. The Creator 
of the race may have dealt with it on this occasion of 
judgment, as a florist does with some decaying plant, 
which he cuts down to the ground in order to secure a 
fresh shoot from the root. At all events, the proof of an 
antediluvian population at once enormously great and very 
largely spread must rest with those who hold, with Dr. 
Kitto, that its numbers and extent were such as to militate 
against the probability of a deluge merely partial ; and any 
such proof we may, with the good old Bishop of Worces- 
ter, well " despair of ever seeing" produced. Even admit- 
ting, however, for the argument's sake, that the inhabitants 
of the Old World may have been as numerous as those of 
China are now, — a number estimated by the recent author- 
ities at more than three hundred and fifty millions, — and 
the admission is certainly greatly larger than there is argu- 
ment enough on the other side to extort, — a comparatively 
partial deluge would have been sufficient to secure their 
destruction. In short, it may be fairly concluded, that if 
there be a show of reason against the theory of a flood 
merely local, it has not yet been exhibited. Even Dr. 
Kitto, with all his ingenuity and learning, has failed to array 
against it arguments of any real weight or cogency ; and 



THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 319 

in my next address I may be perhaps able to show you 
that the objections which, on the other hand, bear against 
the antagonist hypothesis, are at once solid and numerous. 
I may be mistaken in my estimate ; but for some years past 
I have regarded them as altogether insurmountable. 



LECTURE EIGHTH. 

THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 
PART II. 

A CENTUEY has not yet gone by since all the organic 
remains on which the science of Palaeontology is now 
founded were regarded as the wrecks of a universal del- 
uge, and held good in evidence that the waters had pre- 
vailed in every known country, and risen over the highest 
hills. Intelligent observers were not wanting at even an 
earlier time who maintained that a temporary flood could 
not have occasioned phenomena so extraordinary. Such 
was the view taken by several Italian naturalists of the sev- 
enteenth century, and in Britain by the distinguished math- 
ematician Hooke, the contemporary, and in some matters 
rival, of Newton. But the conclusions of these observers, 
now so generally adopted, were regarded both in Popish 
and Protestant countries as but little friendly to Reve- 
lation; and so strong was the opposite opinion, and so 
generally were petrifactions regarded as so many proofs of 
a universal deluge, that Voltaire felt himself constrained, 
first in his Dissertation drawn up for the Academy at 
Bologna, and next in his article on shells in the Philosophi- 
cal Dictionary, to take up the question as charged with one 
of the evidences of that Revelation which it was the great 
design of his life to subvert. And with an unfau*ness too 
characteristic of his sparkling but un solid writings, we find 
him arguing, that all fossil shells were either those of fresh 



THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 321 

water lakes and rivers evaporated during dry seasons, or 
of land snails developed in unusual abundance daring wet 
ones ; or that they were shells which had been dropped 
from the hats of pilgrims on their way from the Holy 
Land to their homes ; or that they were shells that had 
gone astray from cabinets and museums ; or, finally, that 
they were not shells at all, but mere shell-like forms, pro- 
duced by some occult process of nature in the bowels of 
the earth. In fine, in order to destroy the credibility of 
the Noachian deluge, the brilliant Frenchman exhausted 
every expedient in his attempts to neutralize that Palaeon- 
tologic evidence on which geologists now found some of 
their most legitimate conclusions. But he only succeeded, 
instead, in producing compositions of which every sentence 
contains either an absurdity or an untruth, and in raising a 
reaction against the special school of infidelity which he 
had founded, that at length bore it down. He wrote in 
the middle of the Paris basin, with its multitude of fossil 
shells and bones; and, when penning his article for the 
Encyclopaedia, he had, he tells us, a boxful of the shell- 
charged soil of the Faluns of Touraine actually before 
him; but the deluge had to be put down, whatever the 
nature or bearing of the facts; and so he could find in 
either no evidence of a time when the sea had covered 
the land. He found, instead, only " some mussels, because 
there were ponds in the neighborhood." As for the "spiral 
petrifactions termed cornu ammonis^'' of which the Jurassic 
Alps are full, they were not nautili, he said ; they could be 
nothing else than reptiles ; seeing that reptiles take almost 
always the form of a spiral when not in motion ; and it was 
surely more likely, that when petrified they should still 
retain the spiral disposition, than that " the Indian Ocean 
should have long ago overflowed the mountains of Europe." 
Were there not, however, real shells of the Syrian type in 



322 THE NOACHIAJSr DELUGE. 

France and Italy? Perhaps so. But ought "we not to 
recollect," he asked, "the numberless bands of pilgrims 
who carried their money to the Holy Land, and brought 
back shells ? or was it preferable to think that the sea of 
Joppa and Sidon had covered Burgundy and Milanais ? " 
As for the seeming shells of the less superficial deposits, 
" Are we sure," he inquired, " that the soil of the earth 
cannot produce fossils?" Agate in some specimens con- 
tains its apparent sprigs of moss, which, we know, never 
existed as the vegetable they resemble; and why should 
not the earth have, in like manner, produced its apparent 
shells ? Or are not many of these shells mere lake or river 
petrifactions? — one never sees among them "true marine 
substances"!! "If there were any, why have we never 
seen bones of sea dogs, sharks, and whales ? " ! ! ! And 
thus he ran on, in the belief apparently that he had to 
deal with but an ignorant priesthood, too little acquainted 
with the facts to make out a case against him in behalf 
of the Mosaic narrative, and whom at least, should argu- 
ment fail him, he could vanquish with a joke. 

There was, however, a young German, who had not at 
the time quite made up his mind either for the French 
school or against it, who was no uninterested reader of 
Voltaire's disquisitions on fossil shells. And this young 
man was destined to be in the coming age what the 
Frenchman had been in the closing one, — the leading 
mind of Europe. He, too, had been looking at fossils ; 
and having no case to make out either for or against 
Moses, or any one else, he had received in a fair and 
candid spirit the evidence with which they were charged. 
And the gross dishonesty of Voltaire in the matter formed 
so decided a turning point with him, that from that time 
forward he employed his great influence in bearing down 
the French school of infidelity, as a school detestably false 



THE NO A CHI AN DELUGE. 323 

and hollow ; — a warning, surely, to all, whether the}- stand 
up for Revelation or against it, of the danger of being, 
like the witty Frenchman, " wricked overmuch." " To us 
youths," says Goethe, in his Autobiography, "with our 
German love of truth and nature, the factious dishonesty 
of Voltaire, and the perversion of so many worthy sub- 
jects, became more and more annoying, and we daily 
strengthened ourselves in our aversion from him. lie 
could never have done with degrading rehgion and the 
sacred books for the sake of injuring priestcraft, as he 
called it ; and thus produced in me many an unpleasing 
sensation. But when I now learned, that to weaken the 
tradition of a Deluge, he had denied all petrified shells, 
and only admitted them as lusus naturoe^ he entirely lost 
my confidence ; for my own eyes had on the Baschberg 
plainly enough shown me that I stood on the bottom of an 
old di'ied-up sea, among the exuvim of its ancient inhabit- 
ants. These mountains had certainly been once covered 
with waves, — whether before or during the Deluge did 
not concern me: it was enough that the valley of the 
Rhine had been a monstrous lake, — a bay extending 
beyond the reach of eyesight : out of this I w^as not to 
be talked. I thought much more of advancing in the 
knowledge of lands and mountains, let what would be 
the result." I know not in the whole history of opinion 
a more instructive passage than this. Little could Vol- 
taire have known what he was in reality doing, or how 
egregiously he was overreaching himself, when, in labor- 
ing to bear down the evidence borne by fossils to the 
ancient upheavals and cataclysms, he sufiered himself to 
make use of assertions and arguments so palpably unfair. 
And those who employ, in their zeal against the geolo- 
gists, what is still exceedingly common, — the Voltairean 
style of argument, — especially if they employ it in what 



324 THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 

they deem the behalf of religion, might do well to inquire 
whether they are not in some little danger of producing 
the Yoltairean result. 

'No man acquainted with the general outlines of Palaeon- 
tology, or the true succession of the sedimentary forma- 
tions, has been able to beUeve, during the last half century, 
that any proof of a general deluge can be derived from the 
older geologic systems, — Palaeozoic, Secondary, or Terti- 
ary. It has been held, however, by accompUshed geolo- 
gists, within even the last thirty years, that such proof 
might be successfully sought for in what are known as the 
superficial deposits. Such was the behef of Cuvier, — a 
man who, even in geologic science, which was certainly not 
his peculiar province, exerted a mighty influence over the 
thinking of other men. "I agree with MM. Deluc and 
Dolomieu in thinking," w^e find him saying, in his widely 
famed "Theory of the Earth," "that if anything in geol- 
ogy be established, it is, that the surface of our globe has 
undergone a great and sudden revolution, the date of 
which cannot be referred to a much earlier period than 
five or six thousand years ago." But from the same cele- 
brated work we learn that Cu\ier held that this sudden 
catastrophe, — occasioned, as he supposed, by an elevation 
of the sea bottom and a submergence of the previously 
existing l^nd, — had not been universal ; seeing he could 
entertain the behef that the three great races of the 
human family, — Ethiopian, MongoUan, and Caucasian, — 
had all escaped from it in several directions. In referring 
to the marked peculiarities of the Mongolian race, so very 
distinct from the Caucasian, he merely intimates, that he 
was "tempted to believe their ancestors and ours had 
escaped the great catastrophe on diflerent sides ; " but in 
dwelling on the still more marked peculiarities of the 
Negroes, we find him exphcitly stating, that, "all their 



THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. o2o 

characters clearly show that they had escaped from ibo 
overwhelming deluge at another point than the Caucasian 
<ind Altaic races ; from which they had perhaps been sepa- 
Tated," he adds, "for a long time previous to the occurrence 
of that event." For a season, geologists of high standing 
in our own country, such as Buckland and Conybeare, fol- 
lowed Cuvier so far as to hold, that the superficial deposits 
bore evidence everywhere of a great cataclysm, the last of 
the geologic catastrophes ; and which might be identified, 
they believed, with the Noachian Deluge. Against this 
view one of the most distinguished of Scottish naturalists. 
Dr. John Fleming, raised a vigorous protest as early as 
the year 1826, and conclusively showed that no temporary 
flood could have produced the existing appearances. And 
so thoroughly were his facts and reasonings confirmed by 
subsequent discovery, that the geologists of name wdio had 
acquiesced, wholly or in part, in the Ciivierian view, read 
in succession their recantations : Dr. Buckland in especial, 
who had written most largely on the subject, and com- 
mitted himself most thoroughly, did so a very few years 
after: nor does the hypothesis of Cuvier appear to have 
been since adopted by any writer of scientific reputation. 
Instead, therefore, of contending with arguments or in- 
ferences w^hich there are now no parties in the field tr 
maintain, I shall briefly refer to a few of the leading char- 
acteristics of those superficial deposits on which the aban- 
doned conclusions were originally based, and show, in the 
passing, that they are not such as a temporary deluge 
could have produced. 

The superficial deposits include what is known as the 
mammaliferous crag, the diift, the boulder and brick clays, 
the stratified sands and gravels, the travelled rocks, the 
osars, and moraines of the higher latitudes. For it is a 
fiict very significant in its bearings on the diluvial contro- 
28 



o^^j THE XOACIIIAN DELUGE. 

versy, that it is in the higher latitudes in both hemispheres 
that these pecuhar deposits are chiefly to be found. They 
have been traced in Patagonia in the one hemisphere, from 
the southern limits of the country to the forty-first degree 
of south latitude ; and in Europe in the other, to the for- 
tieth ; and in America to even the thirty-eighth degree of 
north latitude. But in the great belt, nearly eighty de- 
grees in breadth, which, encircling the globe from east to 
west, includes with the torrid the warmer portions of the 
temperate zones, they have scarce any existence at all, or 
exist at least in different forms and exceedingly reduced 
proportions. The superficial deposits, in their most charac- 
teristic conditions, are deposits of the colder portions of 
the globe, and in many parts indicate that there prevailed 
during their formation a much severer climate than now 
obtains in the regions in which they occur. The shells 
which they contain in Britain, for instance, though almost 
all of existing species, are many of them such as are not 
now to be found in the British seas, but in seas about 
ten degrees further to the north; and there is evidence 
that the line of perpetual snow must have descended at 
the time to a lower level than that attained by our second- 
class hills, and that almost every Highland valley had its 
glacier. They represent, too, vast periods of time ; — ear- 
lier periods, during which the land gradually sank, till only 
its higher eminences were uncovered, and great floats of 
icebergs went careering over its submerged plains and 
lower hills; and later periods, during which the land as 
gradually arose, after apparently many pauses and oscilla- 
tions, until at length, when it had reached a level scarce 
eighty feet higher than that which it at present maintains, 
the climate softened, and the glaciers which had formed 
in the later times among its hills ultimately disappeared. 
Beds of sea-shells of the boreal type, that belong to those 



THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 327 

ice ages, may be still found occupying the places in which 
they had lived and died, many miles inland, and hundreds 
of feet over the sea level. Boring shells, such as the pho- 
lodadidjB, may be detected far out of sight of the ocean, 
still occupying the cells which they had scooped out for 
themselves in hard limestone or yielding shale ; and serpula 
and nuliporate encrustations may be seen still adhering to 
rocks raised to giddy elevations over the sea. The group 
of mammals, however, which lived during this period, and 
to whose abundant tusks and skeletons one of its older 
deposits (the mammaliferous crag) owes its name, was 
^larked by so peculiar a character, that evidence of a uni- 
versal deluge has been often sought for in their remains. 
The group, — that which immediately preceded the animals 
of our own times, and included not a few of the indigenous 
species wliich still inhabit our country, — was chiefly re- 
markable for containing many genera, all of whose existing 
species are exotic. It had its great elephant, its two species 
of rhinoceros, its hippopotamus, its hyaena, its tiger, and 
its monkey ; and much ingenious calculation has been em- 
ployed by writers such as Granville Penn, in attempting to 
show how these remains might have been transported from 
the intertropical regions during the Flood, not only to 
Britain, but even to the northern wastes of Siberia, — a 
voyage of from four to five thousand miles. There are 
instances ou record in which the bodies of the drowned 
Iiave been drifted from ninety to a hundred and fifty miles 
from the spot where they had been first submerged ; but 
they have always been found, in these cases, in a condition 
of sad mutilation and decay ; whereas the carcass of the 
ancient elephant which was discovered, a little ere the 
commencement of the present century, locked up in ice in 
Siberia, three thousand six hundred miles from where ele- 
phants now live, was in such a state of excellent kecDing, 



328 THE NO A CHI AN DELUGE. 

that the bears and dogs fed upon its flesh. It seems \ dg- 
nificant circumstance too, that the remains of these fossil 
elephants, tigers, and hyagnas, should be associated in even 
our own country with those of well known northern spe- 
cies, — with the remains of the reindeer, of the red deer, 
of the Lithuanian auroch, of the European beaver, of the 
European wolf, of the wild cat, the fox, and the otter. 
Writers, however, such as Mr. Penn, got over both difficul- 
ties. He showed, for instance, how a ship had once run 
across the Atlantic under bare poles, during an almost con- 
tinued hurricane, at the rate of tw^o hundred and eighty- 
eight miles in twenty-four hours, — nearly the rate at which 
the great American steamers cross the same ocean now ; 
and why, he asked, might not the carcasses of elephants 
have drifted northwards at an equal rate on the tides of 
the deluge ? And as for the mixed character of the group 
with which these remains are foimd associated, that was 
exactly w^hat Mr. Penn would have expected in the circum- 
stances. It was the result of a tumultuary flood, which 
had brought together in our northern region the floating 
carcasses of the animals of all climates, to sink in unwonted 
companionship, when putrefaction had done its work, into 
the same deposits. He had, however, unluckily overlooked 
the fact, that comparative anatomy is in reality a science ; 
and further, that it is a science of which men such as 
Cuvier and Owen know a great deal more than the men 
who never studied it, ho^vever respectable. It is the re- 
corded decision of these great anatomists, — a decision 
which has been many times tested and confirmed, — that 
the northern species of elephant, rhinoceros, tiger, and 
hyaena, were entirely difierent from the intertropical spe- 
^<es ; that they difiered from them very considerably more 
than the ass diifers from the horse, or the dog fi'om the 
wolf; and that, while there is a preponderating amount 



THE NOACHIAN DELUGE 329 

of eridence to show that the^ were natives of the coun- 
tries in wliich their remains are now found, there is not 
a shadow of evidence to show that they had ever lived, 
or could have hved, in an intertropical country. Of the 
northern elephant, it is positively known, from the Si- 
berian specimen, that it was covered, like many other 
subarctic animals, with long hair, and a thick crisp under- 
groAviih of wool, about three inches in length, — certainly 
not an intertropical provision ; and so entirely different was 
it in form from either of the existing species, African or 
Indian, that a child could be taught in a single lesson to 
distinguish it by the tusks alone. In fine, the assumption 
that challenges the remains of the old Pleistocene carniv- 
ora and pachydermata as those of intertropical species 
brought northwards by a universal deluge, is about as 
well based and sound as if it challenged the bones of 
foxes occasionally found in our woods for the remains of 
dogs of Aleppo or Askalon brought into Britain by the 
Crusaders, or as if it pronounced a dead ass to be one 
of the cavalry horses of the fatal charge of Balaklava, 
transported to England from the Crimea as a relic of 
the fight. The hypothesis confounds as a species the 
Rosinante of Quixote with the Dapple of Sancho Panza, 
and frames its argument on tlie mistake. 

That this extinct group of animals inhabited for ages the 
countries in which their remains are now embeaded, is 
rendered evident by their great numbers in some localities, 
and from their occurrence in various states of preservation, 
and in beds of various ages. The five hundred mammoths 
whose tusks and grinders were dragged up in thirteer^ 
years by the oyster dredgers of the Norfolk coast from 
a tract of submerged drift, could not all have been 
contemporary in a small corner of England, but must have 
rejDresented several generations. And of com-se the two 
28* 



330 THE XOACHIAX DELUGE. 

thousand grinders brought up from the exposed surface of 
the drift must have borne but a small proportion to the 
thousands still dispersed throughout the entire depth of 
the deposit. Any argument, however, founded on tlie 
mere numbers of these elephantine tusks and grinders, 
and which evaded the important question of species, 
might be eluded, however unfairly, by the assertors of 
a universal deluge. Floods certainly do at times accumu- 
late, in great heaps, bodies of the same specific gravity; 
and why might not a universal flood have accumulated 
on this special tract of drift, the carcasses of many ele- 
phants? But it will be found greatly more difficult to 
elude the ingenious argument on the general question of 
Professor Owen. Next, perhaps, to the extinct elephant, 
one of the most numerous animals of this ancient group 
was the great Irish elk, Megaceros Hibernicus^ a creature 
that, measured to the top of its enormous antlers, stood ten 
feet four inches in height, and exceeded in bulk and size 
the largest horses. Like all other species of the deer 
family, the creature annually shed and renewed its horns ; 
" and a male deer may be reckoned," says Professor Owen, 
"to have left about eight pairs of antlers, besides its 
bones, to testify its former existence upon the earth. But 
as the female has usually no antlers, our expectations might 
be limited to the discovery of four times as many pairs 
of antlers as skeletons in the superficial deposits of the 
countries in which such deer have lived and died. The 
actual proportion of the fossil antlers of the great extinct 
species of British Pliocene deer (which antlers are proved 
by the form of their base to have been shed by the living 
animals) to the fossil bones of the same species, is some- 
what greater than in the above calculation. Although, 
therefore, it may be contended that the swollen carcass of 
a drowned exotic deer might be borne along a diluvial 



THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 



331 



wave to a considerable distance, and its bones ultimately 
deposited far from its native soil, it is not credible that all 
the solid shed antlers of such sjyecies of deer could he 
carried by the same cause to the same distance; or that 
any of them could be rolled for a short distance, with other 

Fig. 111. 




MEGACEROS HIBERNICUS. 

(Irish Elk.) 



heavy debris of a mighty torrent, without fracture and 
signs of friction. But the shed antlers of the large extinct 
species of deer found in this island and in Ireland have 



332 THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 

commonly their parts or branches entire as when they fell ; 
and the fractured specimens are generally found in caves, 
and show marks of the teeth of the ossivorous hymnas by 
which they had been gnawed; thus at the same time 
revealing the mode m which they were introduced into 
those caves, and proving the contemporaneous existence in 
this island of both kinds of mammalia.''^ 

But the contents of the bone caves, consisting in large 
part of the extinct mammals, ought of themselves to be 
decisive in this question. As the opening of the Kirkdale 
cavern is only about four feet each way, a diluvial wave, 
charged with the wreck of the lower latitudes, could 
scarce have washed into such an orifice any considerable 
number of the intertropical animals. And yet there has 
been found in this cave, — with the teeth of a very young 
mammoth, of a very great tiger, of a tiger-like animal 
whose genus is extinct, of a rhinoceros, and of a hij^popot- 
amus, — the fragmentary remains of from two to three 
hundred hygenas. Further, even supposing, what is im- 
possible, that a diluvial wave had swept them all from the 
tropics into the four-feet hole, on what principle is it to be 
explained that the bones thus washed into the cave should 
be all gnawed bones, even those of the hyaenas themselves, 
w^hereas the bones of the same creatures found in the 
mammaliferous deposits of the country bear no marks of 
teeth? Mr. Granville Penn, however, gets over the dif- 
ficulty of the cave, which is hollowed, I may mention, in 
a limestone of the Oolitic series, inclosing the ammonite 
and belemnite, by asserting that its mammaliferous con- 
tents may be somewhat older than itself! The lime- 
stone existed, he holds, as but a mere unformed pulp at 
the time the intertropical animals came floating north- 
wards : they sank into it ; the gasses evolved during 
putrefaction blew up the plastic lime above them into a 



THE NOACIIIAN .-OELUGE. 333 

great oblong bubble, somewhat as a glass-blower blows 
up a bottle ; and hence the Kirkdale cavern, with its 
gnawed bones and its amazing number of teeth. And 
certainly a geologic argument of this ingenious character 
has one signal advantage, — it is in no danger whatever 
of being answered by the geologists. Mr. Penn, in a 
second edition of his work, expressed some surprise that 
an Edinburgh Reviewer should have merely stated his 
argument without replying to it ! ! 

But I need not dwell on the arguments for a universal 
deluge which have been derived from the superficial 
deposits. They all belong to an immature age of geologic 
science, and are of no value whatever. Let us pass rather 
to the consideration of the facts and arguments which 
militate against the universality of the catastrophe. 

The form and dimensions of Noah's ark are definitely 
given in the sacred record. It seems to have been a great 
oblong box, somewhat like a wooden granary, three 
stories high, and furnished with a roof apparently of the 
ordinary angular shape, but with a somewhat broader 
ridge than common; and it measured three hundred 
cubits in length, fifty cubits in breadth, and thirty cubits 
in height. A good deal of controversy has, however, 
arisen regarding the cubit employed ; some holding, with 
Sir Walter Raleigh, and most of the older theologians, 
such as Shuckford and Hales, that the K'oachian cubit 
was what is known as the common or natural cubit, " con- 
taining," says Sir Walter, " one foot and a half, or a length 
equal to that of the human fore-arm measured from the 
sharp of the elbow to the point of the middle finger ; " 
others contending that it was the palm-cubit, " which 
taketh," adds my authority, " one handful more than the 
common;" yet others, the royal or Persian cubit of 
twenty-one inches ; and so on ; for there are, it seems, five 



534 THE NOACHIAN DELUGE , 

several kinds of cubit to choose from, all differing each 
from the others. The controversy is one in which there 
is exceeding little footing for any party. I am inclined, 
however, to adopt, with Raleigh and Hales, the natural 
cubit, for the following reason. The given dimensions of 
the ark form the oldest example of measurement of which 
we have any record ; and all, or almost all, the older and 
simpler standards of measure bear reference to portions 
of the human frame. There is the span, the palm, the 
hand-breadth, the thumb-breadth (or inch), the hair- 
breadth, and the foot. The simple fisherman on our 
coasts still measures off his fathoms by stretching out 
both his arms to the full ; the village sempstress still tells 
off her cloth-breadths by finger-lengths and nails; the 
untaught tiller of the soil still estimates the area of his 
little field by pacing along its sides. Man's first and most 
obvious expedient, when he sets himself to measure, is to 
employ his own person as his standard ; and the first or 
common cubit was a measure of this natural description 
equal in length to the extended fore-arm and hand. All 
the other cubits were artificial compounds of after intro- 
duction; and so, in the absence of direct evidence on the 
point, I accept the most natural and oldest cubit as in all 
probability the one employed in the oldest recorded piece 
of cubit measurement. And the ark, if measured by the 
common or natural cubit, must have been a vessel four 
hundred and fifty feet in length, seventy-five feet in 
breadth, and forty-five feet in height. Dr. Kitto, however, 
though we find him remarking that in computations of 
Scripture measures the cubit may be regarded as half a 
yard (Sir Walter's estimate), adopts, in his own computa- 
tion of the size of the ark, without assigning any reason 
why, the palm-cubit, or cubit of twenty-one inches and 
nearly nine lines (21.888 inches); and, waving all contro- 



THE NOACIIIAN DELUGE, 335 

versy on the question, let us, for the argument's sake, 
admit the larger measure. Let us, — however much in- 
clined to hold with Raleigh, Shuckford,. and Hales, — 
agree with Dr. Kitto that the ark was five hundred and 
forty-seven feet in length, by ninety-one feet in breadth. 
Such dimensions, multiplied by three, the number of 
stories in the vessel, would give an area equal to about 
one seventh that of the great Crystal Palace of 1851. Or, 
to take a more definite illustration from the same vast 
building, the area of the three floors of the ark, taken 
together, would fall short by about twenty-eight tliousand 
square feet of that of the northern gallery of the Palace, 
which measured one thousand eight hundred and forty- 
eight feet in length, by ninety-six feet in breadth. And 
thus, yielding to our opponents their own large measure- 
ments, let us now see whether the non-universality of the 
deluge cannot be fairly predicated from the dimensions of 
the ark. 

I may first remark, however, that measures so definite as 
those given by Moses (definite', of course, if we waive the 
doubt regarding the cubit employed) were effectual in 
setting the arithmeticians to work in all ages of the Churcli, 
in order to determine w^hether all the animals in the world, 
by sevens and by pairs, with food sufficient to serve them 
for a twelvemonth, could have been accommodated in the 
given space. It was a sort of stock problem, that required, 
it was thought, no very high attainments to solve. Eighty 
years have not yet passed since kind old Samuel Johnson, 
in writing to little Miss Thrale a nice little letter, recom- 
mending her to be a good girl, and to mind her arithmetic, 
advised her to try the ark problem. " If you can borrow 
*Wilkins' Real Character,'" we find him saying to the 
young lady, "a folio which perhaps the booksellers can 
let you have, you will have a very curious calculation, 



336 THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 

which you are qualified to consider^ to show that ^N^oah's 
ark was capable of holding all the known animals of the 
world, with provision for all the time in which the earth 
was under water." Unluckily, however, though the dimen- 
sions of the ark were known, the animals of the world were 
not ; and so the question, in at least one of its terms, had 
to be very frequently restated. Let us take it as we find 
it presented (drawn, however, from a much older source), in 
Sir Walter Raleigh's magnificent " History of the World." 
"If in a ship of such greatness," says this distinguished 
man, "we seek room for eighty-nine distinct species of 
beasts, or, lest any should be omitted, for a hundred several 
kinds, we shall easily find place both for them and for the 
birds, which in bigness are no way answerable to them, 
and for meat to sustain them all. For there are three 
sorts of beasts whose bodies are of a quantity well known ; 
the beef, the sheep, and the wolf; to which the rest may 
be reduced by saying, according to Aristotle, that one 
elephant is equal to four beeves, one lion to two wolves, 
and so of the rest. Of beasts, some feed on vegetables, 
others on flesh. There are one-and-thirty kinds of the 
greater sort feeding on vegetables, of which number only 
three are clean, according to the law of Moses, whereof 
seven o^' a kind entered into the ark, namely, three couples 
for breed, and one odd one for sacrifice ; the other eight- 
and-twenty kinds were taken by two of each kind ; so that 
in all there were in the ark one-and-twenty great beasts 
clean, and six-and-fifty unclean ; estimable for largeness as 
ninety-one beeves ; yet, for a supplement (lest, perhaps, 
any species be omitted), let them be valued as a hundred 
and twenty beeves. Of the lesser sort feeding on vege- 
tables were in the ark six-and-twenty kinds, estimable, with 
good allowance for supply, as fourscore sheep. Of those 
which devour flesh s\^ere two-and-thirty kinds, answerable 



THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 337 

to threescore and four wolves. All these two hundred 
and eighty beasts might be kept in one story or room of 
the ark, in their several cabins; their meat in a second; 
the birds and their provision in a third, with space to spare 
for Xoah and his family, and all their necessaries." Such 
was the calculation of the great voyager Raleigh, — a man 
who had a more practical acquaintance with stowage than 
perhaps any of the other writers who have speculated on 
the capabilities of the ark; and his estimate seems sober 
and judicious. It will be seen, however, that from the vast 
increase in our knowledge of the mammals which has taken 
place since the age in which the "History of the World" 
was written, the calculation which embraced all the eighty- 
nine known animals of that time would embrace those of 
but a single centre of creation now ; and that the estimate 
of Sir Walter tells, in consequence, on the side, not of a 
universal, but of a partial deluge. 

As man extended his acquaintance with the mammals, 
he found their number greatly increasing on his hands. 
Buffon, like Raleigh, though a professed naturalist, -and a 
writer of admii'able genius, had no very distinct notions of 
species. He was inclined to question whether even the ass 
might not be merely a degraded horse; and confounded 
many of the mammals of the New World with their repre- 
sentative congeners in the Old. And yet, in summing up 
his history of the mammaliferous division, he could state, 
that though it included descriptions of "a hundred and 
thirty-four different species of creatures that suckled their 
young, many of which had not been observed or described 
before," it was necessarily incomplete, as there were still 
others to add to the list, for whose history there existed no 
materials. At the same time he remarked, however, that 
the "number of quadruped animals whose existence is 
certain and well established does not amoimt to more 
29 



338 THE ]SrOACHIAN DELUGE. 

than two hundred on the surface of the known world." 
Yet here was the extreme estimate made by Raleigh, with 
what he deemed large allowance for the unknown animals, 
fairly doubled ; and under the hands of more discriminating 
naturalists, and in the i:ievitable course of discovery, the 
number has so enormously increased, that the " eighty-nine 
distinct species" known to the great voyager have been 
represented during the last thirty years by the one thou- 
sand mammals of Swainson's estimate, the one thousand one 
hundred and forty-nine mammals of Charles Bonaparte's 
estimate, the one thousand two hundred and thirty mam- 
mals of Winding's estimate, and the one thousand five 
hundred mammals of Oken's estimate. In the first edition 
of the admirable "Physical Atlas" of Johnston (published 
in 1848) there are one thousand six hundred and twenty-six 
different species of mammals enumerated ; and in the second 
edition (published in 1856), one thousand six hundred and 
fifty-eight species. And to this very extraordinary advance 
on the eighty-nine mammals of Raleigh, and the two liun- 
dred mammals of Buffon, we must add the six thousand 
two hundred and sixty-six birds of Lesson, and the six 
hundred and fifty-seven reptiles of Charles Bonaparte ; or 
at least, — subtracting the sea snakes, and perhaps the 
turtles, as fitted to live outside the ark, — his six hundred 
and forty-two reptiles. * 

* The following estimate of the air-breathing vertebrates (that of the 
* Physical Atlas," second edition, 18-50) may be regarded as the latest 
It will be seen that it does not include the cetacea or the seals : — 

SPECIES. 

Quadrumana ..... 170 

Marsupialia ..... 123 

Edentata ...... 28 

Pachydermata ..... 39 

Terrestrial Camivora ..... 514 

Rodentia . , , . . G04 

Ruminantia . • .... 180 

1658 



TIi::i NOACHIAN DELUGE. ' 339 

Such is the number of the known vertebrates, exclusive 
of the fishes, with which in this question we have now to 
deal. Still, however, there are a few lingering theologians, 
some of them very intelligent men, who continue to regard 
the ark as quite big enough for them all. Dr. Hamilton of 
Mobile, for instance, after fairly stating Swainson's estimate, 
namely, one thousand mammalia, six thousand birds, and 
one thousand five hundred reptiles and amphibise, goes on 
to say, that " it must not be forgotten, that of all these, the 
vastly greater proportion are small ; and that numbers of 
them could be placed together in the same compartment 
of the ark." This, however, permit me to say with all 
respect, is not meeting the real diificulty. No doubt many 
of the birds are small, — many of the reptiles are small, — 
many even of the mammals are small, — many small animals 
were kno^vn in the days of Raleigh, and a much greater 
number of small animals are known now ; but the question 
proper to the case seems to be. What proportions do both 
the large and the small animals now known bear to the 
large and small animals kno^vn in the days of Raleigh or 
BufFon ; and how much additional accommodation-room 
would they require during their supposed voyage of a 
twelvemonth? There are two different ways in w^hich 

SPECIES. 

Birds . 6266 

Reptiles. ...... 657 

Turtles 8 ) 

Sea Snakes 7 5 

642 

Great as is this number of animals, compared with those kno^vn a cen- 
tury ago, there are indications that the list is to be increased rather than 
diminished. Even by the latest European authorities the reindeer is 
represented as consisting of but a single species, common to the subarctic 
regions of both the Old and New Worlds; whereas in the "Canadian 
Naturalist" for 1856 I find it stated, on what seems to be competent 
authority, that America has its two species of reindeer, and that thej 
both differ from the European species. 



340 THE NOACIIIAN DELUGE. 

the list of the known animals has been increased, especially 
of the known mammals. They have been increased in a 
certain appreciable proportion by discovery ; and as dis- 
covery has been made chiefly in islands, — for the great 
continents had been previously known, — and as the mam- 
mals of islands, as has been well remarked by Cuvier, are 
usually small, of this appreciable proportion the bulk is 
comparatively not great. The great kangaroo {JSIacrox>us 
giganteus)^ though the inhabitant of an island which ranks 
among the continents, would not much exceed in bulk, 
tried by Raleigh's quaint scale of measurement, a sheep 
and a half, or at most two sheep ; and yet I know not that 
discovery in the islands has added a larger animal to the 
previously known ones than the great kangaroo. Mr. 
\Yaterhouse, when he published, in 1841, his "History 
of the Marsupialia," reckoned up one hundred and five 
distinct sj^ecies of pouched animals; and eighteen species 
more, — in all one hundred and twenty-three, — have been 
since added to the order. With the exception of an opos- 
sum or two, all these raarsupiata may be regarded ^s 
discoveries made since the time of Buffon ; most of them, 
as I have said, are small. And such, generally, has been 
the nature of the revelations made during the last seventy 
years by positive discovery. It is not, however, by dis- 
covery, but by scientific scrutiny into the true nature and 
distinctions of species, that the recent enormous increase in 
the number of the known mammals has mainly taken place. 
And in these cases it will generally be found that the new 
species, which had been previously confounded vnXh some 
oM ones, so nearly resemble the latter in bulk, as well as 
aspect, as to justify in some degree the mistake. Let us 
take two of the greatest animals as examples, — the elephant 
and the rhinoceros. BuflTon confounded the African with 
the Asiatic elephant. We now know that they represent 



THE NOACIIIAN DELUGE. 341 

two well marked species, Eleplias Africanus and Elephas 
Indicus; and that an ark which contained the ancestors of 
all the existing animals would require to have its tico pair 
of elephants, not the one pair only which would have been 
deemed sufficient eighty years ago. Again, with respect 
to the rhinoceros, Buffon was acquainted with the single^ 
horned animal, and had heard of the animal with two 
horns ; and so, though by no means certain that the 
''''variety was constant," he yet held that "two distinct 
species might possibly be established." But we now know 
that there are six species of rhinoceros (seven, according to 
the " Physical Atlas,") — Hh. Indicus^ Hh, Javanus^ Rh, 
Suniatrensis^ Rh. Africanus^ Rh. sinms, and Rh. ketloa/ 
and that, instead of 2^ossibli/ four, at least twelve, or more 
l^robably fourteen, animals of the genus would require, on 
the hypothesis of a universal deluge, to have been accom- 
modated in the ark. Buifon even held that the bison of 
America might be identical with not simply the auroch of 
Europe, which it closely resembles, but with even the 
European ox, which it does not resemble. But it is now 
known, that while the European aurochs are provided by 
nature with but fourteen pairs of ribs, the American bison 
is furnished with fifteen. Of each of the ruminants that 
divide the hoof, there were seven introduced into the ark ; 
and it may be well to mark how, even during the last few 
years, our acquaintance with this order of animals has been 
growing, and how greatly the known species, in their rela- 
tion to human knowledge, have in consequence increased. 
In 1848 (in the first edition of the "Physical Atlas") Mr. 
AVaterhouse estimated the oxen at thirteen species; in 1856 
(in the second edition) he estimates them at twenty. In 
1848 he estimated the sheep at twenty-one species; in 1856 
he estimates them at twenty-seven. In 1848 he estimated 
the goats at fourteen species; in 1856 he estimates them 
29* 



342 THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 

at twenty. In 1846 be estimated the deer at thirty-eight 
species; in 1856 he estimates them at fifty-one. In short, 
if, excluding the lamas and the musks as doubtfully clea?i, 
tried by the Mosaic test, we but add to the sheep, goats, 
deer, and cattle, the forty-eight species of unequivocally 
clean antelopes, and multiply the whole by seven, we shall 
have as the result a sum total of one thousand one hundred 
and sixty-two individuals, — a number more than four times 
greater than that for which Raleigh made provision in the 
ark, and considerably more than twice greater than that 
provided for by the students of Buffon. Such is the nature 
and amount of the increase which has taken place during 
the last half century in the mammaliferous fauna. In so 
great a majority of cases has it increased its bulk in the 
ratio in which it has increased its numbers, that if one ark 
was not deemed more than sufficient to accommodate the 
animal world known to the French naturalist of eighty 
years ago, it would require at least from five to six arks 
to accommodate the animal world known in the present 
day. 

Even in the days of Buffon, however, and at a still earlier 
period, the ark, regarded as a natural means of preservation 
from death by drowning, was usually coupled, in the case 
of at least the carnivorous animals, with certain miraculous 
provisions against death by starvmg. It seems to have 
been generally taken for granted, that the flesh-eating 
animals, when introduced to the shelter of the ark, entirely 
changed the nature indicated by their form of teeth, the 
character of their stomachs, and the shortness of their 
bowels, and fed, for the time they remained in it, exclu- 
sively on vegetable substances, which, in ordinary circum- 
stances, their lacteals could not have converted into chyle. 
Certain figurative expressions in Scripture taken literally, 
which refer to a class of wild animals whose real destiny is 



THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 343 

rather, it would seem, to be extirpated than to be changed, 
coupled with the behef, now no longer tenable, that there 
Avas a time, ere man had sinned, when there was no death 
among the inferior creatures, and of course no eaters of 
flesh, rendered the belief easy of reception ; but it involved 
a miracle nowhere recorded; and the burden of the proof 
that such a miracle actually took place in the circumstances 
lies of necessity on the assertors of a universal deluge. 
Further, of even the creatures that live on vegetables, 
many are restricted in their food to single plants, \Ahicb 
are themselves restricted to limited localities and remote 
regions of the globe. Dr. Hamilton has not referred, in 
his list of animals, to the insects, — a class which, though 
they were estimated in 1842 to consist of no fewer than 
five hundred and fifty thousand species, might yet be 
accommodated in a comparatively limited space. But how 
extraordinary an amount of miracle would it not require to 
bring them all together into any one centre, or to preserve 
them there ! Many of them, like the myriapoda and the 
thysanura, have no wdngs, and but feeble locomotive 
powers ; many of them, such as the ephemera and the 
male ants, live after they have got their wings only a few 
hours, or at most a few days; and there are myriads of 
them that can live upon but single plants that grow in very 
limited botanic centres. Even supposing them all brought 
into the ark by miracle as eggs, what multitudes of them 
would not, without the exertion of further miracle, require 
to be sent back to their proper habitats as w ingless grubs, 
or as insects restricted by nature to a few days of life! 
Or, supposing the eggs all left in their several localities to 
lie under water for a twelvemonth amid mud and debris, — 
thouo^h certain of the hardier kinds miG:ht survive such 
treatment, by miracle alone could the preponderating ma^ 
jority of the class be preserved. And be it remembered, 



344 THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 

that the expedient of having recourse to supposititious 
miracle in order to get over a difficulty insurmountable on 
every natural principle, is not of the nature of argument, 
but simply an evidence of the want of it. Argument is at 
an end when supposititious miracle is introduced. 

But the very inadequate size of the ark, though a con-' 
elusive proof that all, or nearly all, the progenitors of our 
existing animals could not have harbored w^ithin it from 
any general cataclysm, does not furnish a stronger argu- 
ment against the possibility of any such assemblage, than 
the peculiar manner in which we now find these animals 
distributed over the earth's surface. Linnaeus held, early 
in the last century, that all creatures which now inhabit the 
globe had proceeded originally from some such common 
centre as the ark might have furnished ; but no zoologist 
acquainted with the distribution of species can acquiesce 
in any such conclusion now. We now know that every 
great continent has its own peculiar fauna ; that the origi- 
nal centres of distribution must have been, not one, but 
many ; further, that the areas or circles around these cen- 
tres must have been occupied by their pristine animals in 
ages long anterior to that of the Noachian Deluge ; nay, 
that in even the latter geologic ages, they were preceded 
in them by animals of the same general type. There are 
fourteen such areas or provinces enumerated by the later 
naturalists. It may be well, however, instead of running 
any risk of losing ourselves amid the less nicely defined 
provinces of the Old World, to draw our illustrations from 
two and a half provinces of later discovery, whose limits 
have been rigidly fixed by nature. " The great conti- 
nents," says Cuvier, " contain species peculiar to each ; in- 
somuch that whenever large countries of this description 
have been discovered, which their situation had kept iso- 
lated from the rest of the world, the class of quadrupeds 



THE XOACHIAN DELUGE. 345 

which they contained has been found extremely different 
from any that had existed elsewhere. Thus, when the Span- 
iards first penetrated into South America, they did not find 
a single species of quadruped the same as any of Europe, 
Asia, or Africa. The j^uma, the jaguar, the taj^ir, the 
cabiai, the lama, the vicuna, the sloths, the armadilloes, 
the opossums, and the whole tribe of sapajous, were to 
them entirely new animals, of which they had no idea. 
Similar circumstances have recurred in our own time, when 
the coasts of New Holland and the adjacent islands were 
first explored. The various species of kangaroo, phasco- 
lomys, dasyurus, and perameles, the flying phalangers, the 
ornithorynchi, and echidnas, have astonished naturalists by 
the strangeness of their conformations, which presented 
proportions contrary to all former rules, and n'ere inca- 
pable of being arranged under any of the systems then 
in use." New Zealand, though singularly devoid of indig- 
enous mammals and reptiles, — for the only native mam- 
mal seems to be a peculiar species of rat, and the only 
native reptile a small, harmless lizard, — has a scarce less 
remarkable fauna than either of these great continents. 
It consists almost exclusively of birds, some of them so ill 
provided with wings, that, like the wika of the natives, 
they can only run along the ground. And it is a most 
significant fact, that both in the two great continents and 
the New Zealand islands there existed, in the later geo- 
logic ages, extinct faunas that bore the pjeculiar generic 
characters by which their recent ones are still distin- 
guished. The sloths and armadilloes of South America 
had their gigantic predecessors in the enormous mega- 
therium and mylodon, and the strongly armed glyptodon ; 
the kangaroos and wombats of Australia had tneir extinct 
predecessors in a kangaroo nearly twice the size of the 
largest living species, and in so huge a wombat, that its 



346 



THE XOACIIIAX DELUGE. 



bones have been mistaken for those of the hippopotamus ; 
and the ornithic inhabitants of Kew Zealand had their 



Fig. 112. 




MYLODON ROBUSTUS. 
Ficr 113. 




GLYPTODON CLAVIPES. 



predecessors in the monstrous birds, such as the dinornis, 
the aptornis, and the palapteryx, — wingless creatures like 



THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 347 

the ostrich, that stood from six to twelve feet in height. 
In these several regions two generations of species of the 
genera peculiar to them have existed, — the recent goneia- 
tion by whose descendants they are still inhabited, and the 
extinct gigantic generation, whose remains we find locked 
up in their soils and caves. But how are such facts rec- 
oncileable with the hypothesis of a universal deluge ? 
/ The deluge was an event of the existing creation. Had 
it been universal, it would either have broken up all the 
diverse centres, and substituted one great general centre 
instead, — that in which the ark rested; or else, at an 
enormous expense of miracle, all the animals preserved by 
natural means by Noah would have had to be returned by 
supernatural means to the regions whence by means equally 
supernatural they had been brought. The sloths and 
armadilloes, — little fitted by nature for long journeys^ — 
would have required to be ferried across the Atlantic to the 
regions in which the remains of the megathei'ium and 
glyptodon lie entombed ; the kangaroo and wombat, to the 
insulated continent that contains the bones of the extinct 
macropus and phalcolomys ; and the New Zealand birds, 
hicluding its heavy flying quails and its wingless wood-hen, 
to those remote islands of the Pacific in which the skele- 
tons of Palapteryx ingens and Dmornus giganteus lie 
entombed. Nor will it avail aught to urge, with certain 
assertors of a universal deluge, that during the cataclysm, 
sea and land changed their places, and that what is now 
land had formed the bottom of the antediluvian ocean, and, 
vice versa^ what is now sea had been the land on which the 
first human inhabitants of the earth increased and multi- 
2)Ued. No geologist who knows how very various the ages 
of the several table-lands aiiid mountain chains in reality are 
could acquiesce in such an hypothesis ; our own Scottish 
shores, — if to the term of the existing we add that of the 



348 THE NOACHIAX DELUGE. 

ancient coast line, — must have formed the limits of the 
land from a time vastly more remote than the age of the 
deluge. But even supposing, for the argument's sake, the 
hypothesis recognized as admissible, what, in the circum- 
stances of the case, would be gained by the admission ? A 
continuous tract of land would have stretched, — when all 
the oceans were continents and all the continents oceans, — 
between the South American and the Asiatic coasts. And 
it is just possible that, during the hundred and twenty 
years in which the ark was in building, a pair of sloths 
might have crept by inches across this continuous tract, 
from where the skeletons of the great megatheria are 
buried, to where the great vessel stood. But after the 
Flood had subsided, and the change in sea and land had 
taken place, there would remain for them no longer a road- 
way ; and so, though their journey outwards might, in all 
save the impulse which led to it, have been altogether a 
natural one, their voyage homewards could not be other 
than miraculous. ISTor would the exertion of miracle have 
had to be restricted to the transport of the remoter travel- 
lers. How, we may Avell ask, had the Flood been universal, 
could even such islands as Great Britain and Ireland have 
ever been replenished with many of their original inhabit- 
ants ? Even supposing it possible that animals, such as the 
red deer and the native ox might have swam across the 
Straits of Dover or the Irish Channel, to graze anew over 
deposits in which the bones and horns of their remote 
ancestors had been entombed long ages before, the feat 
Avould have been surely far beyond the power of such feeble 
natives of the soil as the mole, the hedgehog, the shrew, 
the dormouse, and the field-vole. 

Dr. Pye Smith, in dealing with this subject, has emphati- 
cally said, that " all land animals having their geographical 
regions, to which their constitutional natures are congenial, 



THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 349 

- — many of them being unable to live in any other situation, 
— we cannot represent to ourselves the idea of their being 
brought into one small spot from the polar regions, the 
torrid zone, and all the other climates of Asia, Africa, 
Europe, and America, Australia, and the thousands of 
islands, — their preservation and provision, and the final 
disposal of them, — mthout bringing up the idea of miracles 
more stupendous than any that are recorded in Scripture. 
The great decisive miracle of Christianity," he adds, — "the 
resurrection of the Lord Jesus, — sinks down before it." 
And let us remember that the preservation and redistribu' 
tion of the land animals would demand but a portion of the 
amount of miracle absolutely necessary for the ^^reservation, 
in the circumstances, of the entire fauna of the globe. The 
fresh water fishes, molluscs, Crustacea, and zoophytes, could 
be kept alive in a universal deluge only by mu-aculous 
means. It has been urged that, though the living Individ- 
uals were to perish, their spawn might be preserved by 
natural means. It must be remembered, however, that 
even of some fishes whose proper habitat is the sea, such as 
the salmon, it is essential for the maintenance of the species 
that the spawn should be deposited in fresh water, nay, in 
running fresh water ; for in still water, however pure, the 
eggs in a few weeks addle and die. The eggs of the com- 
mon trout also require to be deposited in running fresh 
water ; while other fresh water fishes, such as the tench and 
carp, are reared most successfully in still, reedy ponds. 
The fresh water fishes spawn, too, at very difierent seasons, 
and the young remain for very difierent periods in the egg. 
The perch and grayling spawn in the end of April or the 
beginning of May ; the tench and roach about the middle 
of June ; the common trout and powan in October and 
November. And wliile some fishes, such as the salmon, 
remain from ninety to a hundred days in the egg, others, 
30 



350 THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 

such as the trout, are extruded in five weeks. "Without 
special miracle the spawn of all the fresh water fishes could 
not be in existence as such at one and the same time; 
without special miracle it could not maintain its vitality in 
a universal deluge ; and without special miracle, even did it 
maintain its vitality, it could not remain in the e^g state 
throughout an entire twelvemonth, but would be developed 
into fishes of the several species to Avhich it belonged at 
very different periods. Further, in a universal deluge, 
without special miracle vast numbers of even the salt water 
animals could not fail to be extirpated ; in particular, almost 
all the molluscs of the littoral and laminarian zones. Nor 
would the vegetable kingdom fare greatly better than the 
animal one. Of the one hundred thousand species of known 
plants, few indeed would survive submersion for a twelve- 
month ; nor would the seeds of most of the others fare 
better than the plants themselves. There are certain hardy 
seeds that in favorable circumstances maintain their vitality 
for ages ; and there are others, strongly encased in water- 
tight shells or skins, that have floated across oceans to ger- 
minate in distant islands ; but such, as every florist knows, 
is not the general character of seeds ; and not until after 
many unsuccessful attempts, and many expedients had been 
resorted to, have the more delicate kinds been brought 
uninjured, even on shipboard, from distant countries to our 
own. It is not too much to hold that, without siDecial 
miracle, at least three fourths of the terrestrial vegetation 
of the globe would have perished in a universal deluge that 
covered over the dry land for a year. Assuredly the vai-i- 
ous vegetable centres or regions, — estimated by Schouw 
at twenty-five, — bear witness to no such catastrophe. 
Still distinct and unbroken, as of old, either no effacing 
flood has passed o /er them, or they were shielded from its 
effects at an expense of miracle many times more consider- 



THE noaciiia:^^ deluge. 351 

Me than that at which the Jews were brought out of 
Egyi^t and preserved amid the nations, or Christia-nity 
itself was ultimately established.* 

There is, however, a class of learned and thoroughly 
respectable theologians who seem disposed to accept rather 
of any amount of unrecorded miracle, than to admit of 
a merely partial deluge, coextensive with but the human 
family. " Were the difficulty attending this subject tenfold 
greater, and seemingly beyond all satisfactory explanation," 
says Dr. William Hamilton, " if I yet find it recorded in the 
Book of Revelation, that in the deluge ' everi/ living thing 
in v:hich is the breath of life perished^ and Noah only 
remained alive^ and they v-hich u-ere tcith him in the ark^ 
I could still believe it implicitly, satisfied that the difficulty 
of explanation springs solely from the imperfection of 
human knowledge, and not from any limitation in the 
lK)wer or the Avisdom of God, nor yet from any lack of 
trustworthiness in the document given us in a rcA'elation 
from God, — a document given to men l)y the hands of 
Moses, the learned, accomplished, and eminently devout 
Jewish legislator." Here again, however. Dr. Hamilton 
seems to have mistaken the question actually at issue. The 
true question is, not whether or no Moses is to be believed 
in tlie matter, but Avhether or no we in reality understand 
Moses. The question is, whether we are to regard the pas- 
sages in A^■hich he describes the Flood as universal, as 

* If T do not introduce here the argument founded on the great age of 
certain gigantic trees, such as the Baobab of intertropical Africa, or the 
Taxodium of South America, it is not because I have any reason to chal- 
lenge the estimates of Adanson or Candolle. The one tree may have 
lived its five thousand, the other its six thousand, yeai's ; but as the 
grounds have been disputed on which the calculations respecting their 
vast age have been founded, and as they cannot be reexamined anew by 
the reader, I wholly omit the evidence, in the general question, which they 
have been oupposcd lo luruish. 



352 THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 

belonging to the very numerous metonyniic texts of Scrip- 
ture in which a part — sometimes a not very large part — ■ 
is described as the whole, or to regard them as strictly and 
severely literal. Or, in other words, whether we are, with 
learned and solid divines of the olden time, such as Poole 
and Stillingfleet, and with many ingenious and accomplished 
divines of the passing age, such as the late Dr. Pye Swth 
and the Rev. Professor Hitchcock, to regard these passages 
as merely metonymic ; or, with Drs. Hamilton and Kitto, to 
regard them as strictly literal, and to call up in support of 
the literal reading an amount of supposititious miracle, 
compared with which all the recorded miracles of the Old 
and 'New Testaments sink into insignificance. The con- 
troversy does not lie between Moses and the naturalists, 
but between the readm(/s of theologians such as Mattliew 
Poole and StiUingfleet on the one hand, and the readings 
of theologians such as Drs. Hamilton and Kitto on the 
other. And finding all natural science arrayed against the 
conclusions of the one class, and in favor of those of the 
other, and believing, further, that there has been always 
such a marked economy shoAvn in the exercise of miracu- 
lous powers, that there has never been more of miracle 
employed in any one of the dispensations than was needed,* 
I must hold that the theologians who believe that the 
deluge was but coextensive ^\ith the moral purpose which 

* The following excellent remarks on the economy of miracle, by 
Chalmers, bear very directly on this subject : — "It is remarkable that God 
is sparing of miracles, and seems to pi-efer the ordinarj'' processes of nature, 
if equally effectual for the accomplishment of his purposes. He might 
have saved Noah and his family by miracles; but he is not prodigal of 
these, and so he appointed that an ark should be made to bear up the 
living cargo which was to be kept alive on the surface of the waters; and 
not only so, but he respects the laws of the animal physiology, as he did 
those of hydrostatics, in that he put them by pairs into the ark, male and 
female, to sccui'O their trani>missiou to after ages, and food was stored u^ 



THE NOACniAN DELUGE. 853 

it served are more in the right, and may be more safely 
followed, than the theologians who hold that it extended 
greatly further than was necessary. It is not with Moses 
or the truth of revelation that our controversy lies, but 
with the opponents of Stillingfleet and of Poole. 

To only one of the other arguments employed in this 
controversy need I at all refer. The cones of volcanic 
craters are formed of loose incoherent scoriae and ashes, 
and, when exposed, as in the case of submarine volcanoes, 
such as Graham's Island and the islands of Nyoe and Sa- 
brina, to the denuding force of waves and currents, they 
have in a few weeks, or at most a few months, been washed 
completely away. And yet in various parts of the world, 
such as Auvergne in central France, and along the flanks 
of ^tna, there are cones of long extmct or long slumber- 
ing volcanoes, which, though of at least triple the antiquity 
of the Noachian deluge, and though composed of the ordi- 
nary incoherent materials, exhibit no marks of denudation. 
According to the calculations of Sir Charles Lyell, no dev- 
astating flood could have passed over the forest zone of 
><Etna during the last twelve thousand years, — for such is 
the antiquity which he assigns to its older lateral cones, 
that retain in integrity their original shape ; and the vol- 
'ianic cones of Auvergne, which inclose in their ashes the 
remains of extinct animals, and present an outline as per- 
fect as those of JEtna, are deemed older still. Graham 
Island arose out of the sea early in July, 1831 ; in the be- 
ginning of the following August it had attained to a cir- 
cumference of three miles, and to a height of two hundi'ed 

to sustain them during their long confineTnent. In short, he dispenses 
with miracles wlicn these are not requisite for the fulfilment of his ends; 
and he never dispenses with the ordinaiy means when these are fitted, 
and at the same time sufficient, for the occasion." — Daily Scripture Head- 
inys, vol. i. p. 10. 



354 THE NOACIIIAN DELUGE. 

feet ; and yet in less than three months from that time 
the Avaves had washed its immense mass down to the sea 
level; and in a few weeks more it existed but as a dan- 
gerous shoal. And such ineAitahly would have been the 
fate of the equally incoherent cone-like craters of ^tna 
and Auverijne during^ the seven and a half months that 
intervened between the breaking up of the fountains of 
the great deep and the reappearance of the mountain-tops, 
had they been included within the area of the deluge. It 
is estimated that even the newer Auvergne lavas are as 
old as the times of the Miocene. It is at least a demon- 
strable fact, that the slow action of streams had hollowed 
them in several places into deep chasms nearly two thou- 
sand years ago; for the remains of Koman works of 
about that age survive, to show that they had then, as 
now, to be sj^anned over by bridges, and that baths had 
been erected in their denuded recesses ; and yet the craters 
out of which these lavas had flowed retain Avell nigh all 
their original sharpness of outline. JtsTo wave ever dashed 
against their symmetrically sloping sides. Now, I have in 
no instance seen the argument derivable from this class of 
facts fairly met. The supposed mistake of the Canonico 
Recupero, or rather of Brydone, who argued that the 
** lowest of a series of seven distinct lavas of ^tna, most 
of them covered by thick intervening beds of rich earth, 
must have been fourteen thousand years old," has been 
often referred to in the controversy. Brydone or the 
Canon mistook, it has been said, beds of brown ashes, 
each of which might have been deposited during a single 
shower, for beds of rich earth, each of which would have 
taken centuries to form. The oldest of the series of lava 
beds, therefore, instead of being fourteen thousand, miglit 
be scarce fourteen hundred years old. And if Brydone 
or the Canon were thus mistaken in their calculations, why 



THE NOACIIIAN DELUGE. S55 

may not the modern geologists be also mistaken in theirs ? 
Xow, altogether waiving the question as to whether the 
ingenious traveller of eighty-six years ago was or was not 
mistaken in his estimate, — for to those acquainted with ge- 
ologic fact in general, or more particularly with the elabo- 
rate descriptions of ^tna given during the last thirty years 
by Elie de Beaumont, Hoffmann, and Sir Charles Lyell, the 
facts of Brydone, in their bearing on either the age of the 
earth or the age of the mountain, can well be spared, — 
waiving, I say, the question whether the traveller was in 
reality in mistake, I must be permitted to remark, that 
the concurrent testimony of geologists cannot in fairness 
be placed on the same level as the testimony of a man 
-who, though accomplished and intelligent, was not only 
no geologist, but who observed and described ere geol- 
ogy had any existence as a science. Further, I must be 
allowed to add, that geology is now a science ; and that 
individuals unacquainted with it in its character as such 
place themselves in positions greatly more perilous than 
they seem to think, when they enter on the field of argu- 
ment with men who for many years have made it a sub- 
ject of special study. It is not by "bidding dowTi" the 
age of the extmct or quiescent volcanoes by a species of 
blind haggling, or by presuming mistake in the calcula- 
tions regarding them, simply because mistakes are possible 
and have sometimes been made, that that portion of the 
cumulative evidence against a universal deluge which they 
furnish is to be neutralized or set aside. The argument on 
the general question is a cumulative one ; and while many 
of its component portions are of themselves so conclusive, 
that only supposititious miracle, and not presentable argu- 
ment, can be arrayed against them, its aggregate force 
seems wholly irresistible. In passing, however, from the 
facts and reasonings that bear against the hypothesis of a 



356 THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 

universal deluge, to indicate in a few sentences both the 
possible mode in which a merely partial flood might have 
taken place, and the probable extent of area which it cov- 
ered, I shall have to remove from very strong to compara- 
tively weak ground, — from what can be maintained as 
argument, to what can at best be but offered as conjecture. 
There is a remarkable portion of the globe, chiefly in 
the Asiatic contment, though it extends into Europe, and 
which is nearly equal to all Europe in area, whose rivers 
(some of them, such as the Volga, the Oural, the Sihon, 
the Kour, and the Amoo, of great size) do not fall into the 
ocean, or into any of the many seas which communicate 
with it. They are, on the contrary, all turned inwards^ if 
I may so express myself; losing themselves, in the eastern 
parts of the tract, in the lakes of a rainless district, in 
which they supply but the waste of evaporation, and fall- 
ing, in the western parts, into seas such as the Caspian and 
the Aral. In this region there are extensive districts still 
under the level of the ocean. The shore line of the Cas- 
pian, for instance, is rather more than eighty-three feet 
beneath that of the Black Sea ; and some of the great flat 
steppes which spread out around it, such as what is known 
as the Steppe of Astracan, have a mean level of about 
thirty feet beneath that of the Baltic. Were there a 
trench-like strip of country that communicated between 
the Caspian and the Gulf of Finland to be depressed be- 
neath the level of the latter sea, it would so open up the 
fountains of the great deep as to lay under water an exten- 
sive and populous region, containing the cities of Astracan 
and Astrabad, and many other towns and villages. Nor is 
it unworthy of remark, surely, that one of the depressed 
steppes of this peculiar region is known as the "Low 
Steppe of the Caucasus," and forms no inconsiderable por- 
tion of the great recognized centre of the human family. 



THE NOxVCIIIAN DELUGE. 357 

The Mount Ararat on which, according to many of our 
commentators, the ark rested, rises immediately on the 
western edge of this great hollow ; the Mount Ararat se- 
lected as the scene of that event by Sir Walter Raleigh, 
certainly not without some show of reason, lies far within 
it. Vast jDlains, white with salt, and charged with sea 
shells, show that the Caspian Sea was at no distant period 
greatly more extensive than it is now. In an outer region, 
which includes the vast desert of Khiva, shells also abound ; 
but they seem to belong, as a group, rather to some of the 
later Tertiary eras than to the recent period. It is quite 
possible, however, that, — as on parts of the western shores 
of our own country, where recent marine deposits lie over 
marine deposits of the Pleistocene age, while a terrestrial 
deposit, representative of an intervening paroxysm of up- 
heaval, lies between, — it is possible, I say, that in this 
great depressed area, the region covered of old by a Ter- 
tiary sea, which we know united the Sea of Aral with the 
Caspian, and rolled over many a wide stepj^e and vast j^lain, 
may have been again covered for a brief period (after ages 
of upheaval) by the breaking in of the great deep during 
that season of judgment when, with the exception of one 
family, the Avhole human race was destroyed. It seems 
confirmatory of this view, that during even the historic 
period, at least one of the neighboring inland seas, though 
it belongs to a different system from that of the Caspian 
and the Aral, covered a vastly greater area than it does 
now, — a consequence, apparently, of a more considerable 
depression hi the Caucasian region than at present exists. 
Herodotus, as quoted by Cuvier in his " Theory of the 
Earth," represents the Sea of Azoff as equal in extent to 
the Euxine. 

AVith the known facts, then, regarding this depressed 
Asiatic region before us, let us see whether we cannot 



358 THE NOACIIIAN DELUGE. 

originate a theory of the Dekige free from at least the 
palpable monstrosities of the older ones. Let us suppose 
that the human family, still amounting to several millions, 
though greatly reduced by exterminating wars and ex- 
hausting vices, were congregated in that tract of country 
which, extending eastwards from the modern Ararat to far 
beyond the Sea of Aral, includes the original Caucasian 
centre of the race: let us suppose that, the hour of judg- 
ment having at length arrived, the land began gradually to 
sink, as the tract in the run of Cutch sank in the year 1819, 
or as the tract in the southern part of ISTorth America, 
known as the "sunk country," sank in the year 1821 : fur- 
ther, let us suppose that the depression took place slowly 
and equably for forty days together, at the rate of about 
four Imndred feet per day, — a rate not twice greater than 
that at which the tide rises in the Straits of Magellan, 
and which would have rendered itself apparent as but a 
persistent inward flowing of the sea: let us yet further 
suppose, that from mayhap some volcanic outburst co- 
incident with the depression, and an efiect of the same 
deep seated cause, the atmosphere was so affected, that 
heavy drenching rains continued to descend during the 
whole time, and that, though they could contribute but 
little to the actual volume of the flood, — at most only 
some five or six inches per day, — they at least seemed to 
constitute one of its main causes, and added greatly to its 
terrors, by swelling the rivers, and rushing downwards in 
torrents from the hills. Tlie depression, which, by extend- 
ing to the Euxine Sea and the Persian Gulf on the one 
hand, and to the Gulf of Finland on tlie other, would open 
up by three separate channels the fountains of the great 
deep, and which included, let us suppose, an area of about 
two thousand miles each Avay, would, at the end of the 
fortieth day, be sunk in its centre to the depth of sixteen 



THE NOACHIAN DELUGE 359 

thousand feet, — a depth sufficiently profound to bury the 
loftiest mountains of the district ; and yet, having a gradient 
of declination of but sixteen feet per mile, the contour of 
its hills and plains would remain apparently what they had 
been before, — the doomed inhabitants would see but tlie 
water rising along the mountain sides, and one refuge after 
another swept away, till the last witness of the scene would 
have perished, and the last hill-top would have disappeared. 
And when, after a hundred and fifty days had come and 
gone, the depressed hollow would have begun slowly to 
rise, — and when, after the fifth month had passed, the aik 
would have grounded on the summit of Mount Ararat, — 
all that could have been seen from the upper window of 
the vessel would be simply a boundless sea, roughened by 
tides, now flowing outwards, with a reversed course, towards 
the distant ocean, by the three great outlets which, during 
the period of depression, had given access to the waters. 
Xoah would of course see tliat " the fountains of the deep 
were stopped," and "the waters returning from off the 
earth continually;" but whether the Deluge had been 
partial or universal, he could neither see nor know. Ilis 
prospect in either case would have been equally that de- 
scribed by the poet Bowles : — 

" The mighty ark 
Rests upon Ararat; but nought around 
Its inmates can behold, save o'er the expanse 
Of boundless waters the sun's orient orb 
Stretching the hull's long shadow, or the moon 
In silence through the silver-curtained clouds 
Sailing, as she herself were lost and left 
In hollow loneliness." 

Let me farther remark, that in one important sense a 
partial Flood, such as the one of which I liave conceived as 
adequate to the destruction, in an early age, of the whole 



3G0 THE NOACIIIAN DELUGE. 

human family, could scarce be regarded as miraculous. 
Several of our first geologists ' hold, that some of the 
formidable cataclysms of the remote past may have been 
occasioned by the sudden upheaval of vast continents, 
which, by displacing great bodies of water, and rolling 
them outwards in the character of enormous waves, inun- 
dated wide regions elevated hundreds of feet over the sea 
level, and strcAved them over with the rock boulders, clays, 
gravels, and organic debris of deep sea bottoms. And 
these cataclysms they regard as perfectly natural, though 
of course very unusual, events. Nor would the gradual 
depression of a continent, or, as in the supposed case, of a 
portion of a continent, be in any degree less natural than 
the sudden upheaval of a continent. It would, on the 
contrary, be much more according to experience. Nay, 
were such a depression and elevation of the great Asiatic 
basin to take place during the coming twelvemonth as tliat 
of which I have conceived as the probable cause of tlie 
Deluge, though the geologists would have to describe it as 
beyond comparison the most remarkable oscillation of level 
which had taken place within the historic period, they 
would certainly regard it as no more miraculous than the 
great earthquake of Lisbon, or than that exhibition of the 
volcanic forces which elevated the mountain of Jorullo in a 
single night sixteen hundred feet over the j)lain. And why 
have recourse, in speculating on the real event of four 
thousand years ago, to supposititious miracle, if an event 
^f apparently the same kind would not be regarded as 
miraculous now? May we not in this matter take our 
stand beside the poet, who, when recognizing a Providence 
in the great Calabrian earthquake, and in the overwhelming 
wave by which it was accompanied, pertinently inquired of 
the skeptics, — 



THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 361 

" Has not God 
Still wrought by means since first he made the world ? 
And did he iwt of old employ his means 
To drown it ? What is his creation less 
Than a capacious reservoir of means, 
Formed for his use, and ready at his will ?" 

The revelation to Noah, which warned him of a coming 
Flood, and taught him how to prepare for it, was evidently 
miraculous : the Flood itself may have been purely provi- 
dential. But on this part of the subject I need not dwell. 
I have accomplished my purpose if I have shown, as was 
attempted of old by divines such as Stillingfleet and Poole, 
that there '' seems to be no reason why the deluge should 
be extended beyond the occasion of it, which was the 
corruption of man,'' but, on the contrary, much reason 
against it ; and that, on the other hand, a Flood restricted 
and partial, and yet sufficient to destroy the race in an 
early age, while still congregating in their original centre, 
cannot be regarded as by any means an incredible event. 
The incredibility lies in the mere human glosses and mis- 
interpretations in which its history has been enveloped. 
Divested of these, and viewed in its connection with those 
wonderful traditions which still float all over the world 
regarding it, it forms, not one of the stumbling-blocks, but 
one of the evidences, of our faith ; and renders the exercise 
a not unprofitable one, when, according to the poet, — 



*' Back through the dusk 
Of ages Contemplation turns her view, 
To mark, as from its infancy, the world 
Peopled again from that mysterious shrine 
That rested on the top of Ararat." 

31 



LECTURE NISTH. 

THE DISCOVERABLE AND THE REVEALED. 1 

It seems natural, nay, inevitable, that false revelations, 
which have descended from remote, unscientific ages, should 
be committed to a false science. Natural phenomena, when 
of an extraordinary character, powerfully impress the un- 
tutored mind. In operating, through the curiosity or the 
fears of men, upon that instinct of humanity — never wholly 
inactive in even the rudest state — Avhich cannot witness 
any remarkable effect without seeking to connect it with its 
producing cause, they excite into activity in the search the 
imaginative faculty, — always of earlier development than the 
judgment in both peoples and individuals, and which never 
fails, when so employed, to conduct to delusions and extrav- 
agances. And this state of mind gives birth simultaneously 
to both false religion and false science. Great tempests, 
inundations, eclipses, earthquakes, thunder and lightning, 
famine and pestilence, the births of monsters, or the rare 
visitation of strange fishes or wild animals, come all to be 
included in the mythologic domain. Even the untutored 
Indian " sees God in clouds, and hears him in the wind." 
And when an order of priesthood springs up, a portion of 
the leisure of the class is usually employed in speculating 
on these phenomena ; and to their speculations they give 
the form of direct revelation. Thus almost all the false 
religions of the old world — not grafted, like Moham- 
medanism, on the true one — have their pretended revela- 



^HE DISCOVERABLE AND REVEALED. 363 

tions regarding the form, structure, and origin of the earth, 
the mechanism of the heavens, the electric and meteoric 
phenomena, and even the arrangement of oceans and 
continents on the surface of our planet. 
( The old extinct forms of heathenism, — Etrurian, Egyp- 
tian, Phoenician, and Babylonian, — had all their cosmogo- 
nies.* In the wild mj^hology of ancient Scandinavia, of 
which we find such distinct traces in the languages and 
superstitions of northern Europe, and which even in our 
own country continues to give the names of its uncouth 
deities to the days of our week, there is a strange genesis 
of not only the heavens and earth, but of the gods also. It 
has, besides, its scheme of the universe in its great mundane 
tree of three vast roots, — celestial, terrestrial, and infernal, 
— which supports the land, the sea, the sky, and all things. 
The leading religions of the East w^hich still survive, such as 
Buddhism, Brahminism, and Parseeism, have all their 
astronomy, geography, meteorology, and geology, existing 
as component parts of their several systems. ISTor have 
there been wanting ingenious men who, though little toler- 
ant of the various attempts made to reconcile the Mosaic 
account of creation with the discoveries of modern science, 
have looked with a favorable eye on the TVTld science of the 
false reUgions, and professed to detect in it at least striking 
analogies with the deductions of both the geologist and the 
astronomer. When the skeptical wits of the last century 
wished to produce, by way of foil, a morality vastly 
superior, as they said, to that of Christianity, they had 
recourse to the Brahmins and the Chinese. And though 
we hear less of the ethics of these people since we have 
come to know them better, we are still occasionally 

* For a brief but masterly view of these ancient cosmogonies, sec the 
Rev. D. Macdonald's " Creation and the Fall." Edinburgh : Constable & 
Co. 



364 THE DISCOVERABLE 

reminded of the superiority of their science. Hinduism has 
been regarded as furnishing examples of the geologic doc- 
trine of a succession of creations extended over immensely 
protracted geologic periods ; and Buddhism represented aa 
charged with both the geologic doctrine and the perhaps 
less certain astronomic deduction of a plurality of worlds. 
And before entering on our general argument, it may be 
well to show by specimen what mere chance hits these are, 
and how enormous the amount of the nonsense and absurd- 
ity really i^ in which they are set. 

When Brahma, wearied with the work of producing and 
maintaining the universe, goes to sleep, say the Hindus, — 
an occurrence which happens at the end of every four mil- 
lions of years, — a deluge of water rises high above the sun 
and moon, and, the worlds and their inhabitants are de- 
stroyed. When he awakes, however, he immediately sets 
himself to produce anew ; and another universe springs up, 
consisting, like the former one, of ten worlds placed over 
each other, like the stories of a tall building, and replenished 
with plants and animals. Of these our own world is the 
eighth in number, reckoning from the ground floor up- 
wards ; there are seven worlds worse than itself beneath it, 
and two better ones above ; with a few worlds more higher 
up still, to which the destroying flood does not reach, save 
once or twice in an eternity or so ; and which, in conse- 
quence, have not to be re-created each time with the others. 
The special forms which the upper and nether worlds ex- 
hibit do not seem to be very well known ; but that which 
man inhabits is " flat, like the flower of the water-lily, in 
which the petals project beyond each other ; " and it has in 
all, including sea and land, a diameter of several hundred 
thousand millions of miles. It has its many great oceans, 
— one of these (unfortunately the only one in contact with 
man's place of habitation) of salt water, one of sugar-cane 



AND THE REVEALED. 365 

juice, one of spirituous liquor, one of clarified butter, and 
one of sour curds. It has, besides, its very great ocean of 
sweet water. And around all, forming a sort of gigantic 
hoop or ring, there extends a continent of pure gold. Of 
all the luminaries that rise over this huge world, the sun is 
the nearest : the distance of the moon is twice as great ; the 
lesser fixed stars occur immediately beyond ; then Mercury, 
then Venus, then Mars, then Jupiter, then Saturn; and 
finally, the great bear and the polar star. And such is that 
cosmogony and astronomy of the Brahmins to which their 
religion, in its character as a revelation, stands committed, 
and in which a very lenient criticism has found the geologic 
revolutions. Let me draw my next illustration from Bud- 
dhism, the most ancient and most widely spread religion of 
the East; for, though partially overlaid in the great Indian 
peninsula by the more modern monstrosities of Brahminism, 
it extends in one direction fi'om the Persian Gulf to For- 
mosa and Japan, and in the other from the wastes of 
Siberia to the Gulf of Siam. Scarce any of the other forms 
of heathenism darken so large a portion of the map as 
Buddhism, — a superstition which is estimated to include 
within its pale nearly one third of the whole human 
sj)ecies. 

It has been held, I need scarce say, by most astronomers 
since the times of Newton, that the universe consists of 
innumerable systems of worlds, furnished each with its own 
sun ; and held by most geologists during the last fifty years, 
that the past duration of our earth was divided into periods 
of vast extent, each of which had a creation of its own. 
And certainly in Buddhism w^e find both these ideas, — the 
idea of the existence of separate systems, each with its own 
sun ; and the idea of successive periods, each with its own 
creation. "We ascertain on examination, however, that in 
the superstition they are not scientific ideas at all, but mere 
31* 



366 THE DISCOYERABLE 

chance guesses, set, like those of Brahminism, in a farago 
of wild and monstrous fable. Each of the many systems of 
which the universe is composed consists, say the Buddhists, 
of three worlds of a circular form, joined together at the 
edges, so that there intervenes between them an angular 
intersi^ace, which constitutes their common hell ; and to 
each of these systems there is a sun and moon apportioned, 
that talie their daily journeys over them, returning at night 
through a void space underneath. And each of the bygone 
successive creations was a creation originated, it is added, 
out of chaos, through the stored-up merits of the Buddhas, 
and the effects of a life-invigorating rain, and which sank 
into chaos again when the old stock of merit, accumulated 
in the previous period, was exhausted. The creatures of 
each period, too, whether brute or human, were animated 
by but the souls of former creatures embodied anew. In 
the centre of each of the three worlds of which a system or 
sackwala consists, there is a vast mountain, more than forty 
thousand miles in height, surrounded by a circular sea, 
which is in turn surrounded by a ring of land and rock. 
Another circular sea lies outside the ring, and a second 
solid ring outside the sea ; and thus rings of land .and water 
alternate from the centre to the circumference. According 
to the geography of the Buddhas, a model of our own earth 
would exactly resemble that old-fashioned ornament, — a 
work of the turning-lathe, — which some of my auditors 
must have seen roughening the upper board of the ornate 
parlor bellows of the last century, and which consisted of a 
large central knob, surrounded by alternate circular rings 
and furrows. And as in the old-fashioned bellows each ring 
flattened, and each furrow became shallower, in proportion 
as it was removed from the centre, so in the Buddhist earth, 
the seas, from being many thousand miles deep in the inner 
ringSj shallow so greatly, that in the outer rings their depth 



AND THE REVEALED. 367 

is only an incli; while the continents, from being forty 
thousand miles high, sink into mere plains, almost on the 
level of the surrounding ocean. Such is the geography to 
which this religion pledges itself, j Its astronomy, on the 
other hand, is not quite so bad as that to w^hich Father 
Cullen has affixed his imprimatur, seeing that, though it 
gives the same sort of diurnal journey to the sun, it confers 
upon it a diameter, not of only six feet, but of four hundred 
miles. Xor is^ts geology a great deal worse than that of 
many Christians. It! makes the earth consist, reckoning 
from its foundations upwards, of a layer of wind, a layer of 
water, a layer of substance resembling honey, a layer of 
rock, and a layer of soil. Such is a small portion of the 
natural science of Buddhism : the minute details of its mon- 
strous cosmogony, w^ith its descriptions of fabulous oceans, 
inhabited by fishes thousands of miles in length, and of 
wonderful forests abounding in trees four hundred miles 
high, and haunted by singing lions that leap two miles at a 
bound, occupy many chapters of the sacred volumes. ■ Every 
form of faith has its heretics ; and there are, it would seem, 
heretics among even the Buddhists, who, instead of adopt- 
ing the nonsense of the priests in this physical department, 
originate a nonsense equally great of their own. The erroi* 
of concluding that the worlds of the universe are finite in 
number, say the sacred books, is the heresy antawacla; the 
error of concluding that the world itself is infinite is the 
heresy anantawada ; the error of concluding that the world 
is finite vertically but infinite horizontally is the heresy 
anantanantawada; and the error of concluding the world 
to be neither finite nor infinite is the heresy naioantanan- 
tawada. A name equally formidable would be, of course, 
foimd for the students of modern astronomy and the other 
kindred sciences, among the professed believers in Buddh, 
did not these contrive to get over the difficulty by observing, 



368 THE DISCOVERABLE 

" that certain things, as stated in the Sastras, mnst have 
been so formerly ; but great changes have taken place in 
these in latter times ; and for astronomical purposes astro- 
nomical rules must be followed." 

Believers in Buddhism may be still found by tens of 
millions on the shores of the Yellow Sea. Let me select 
my third specimen of a universe-fashioning mythology from 
a faith, long since extinct, that had its seat on the opposite 
side of the Old World, along the coasts of the IN'orthern 
Atlantic. The old Teutonic religion professed to reveal, 
like that of Buddh and of Brahma, how the heavens and 
earth were formed, and of lohat. Ymir, the great frost- 
giant, a being mysteriously engendered out of frozen vapor, 
was slain by the god Odin and his brothers ; and, dragging 
his body into the middle of the universe, they employed 
the materials of which it was composed in forming the 
earth. Of his blood they made the vast ocean, and all the 
lakes and rivers; of his flesh they constructed the land, 
placing it in the midst of the waters; of his bones they 
built up the mountains ; his teeth and jaws they broke up 
into the stones and pebbles of the earth and shore ; of his 
great skull they fashioned the vault of the heavens ; and, 
tossing his brains into the air, they became the clouds. 
Earth, sea, and sky, however, thus made, were supported 
by the great ash-tree Yggdrasill, which, with its roots 
anchored deej) in the primordial abyss, rose uj) through 
the vast central mountains of the world, and, stretching 
forth its branches to the furthest heaven, bore the stars as 
its fruit. Encircling the whole earth Uke a ring, lay the 
huge snake Midgard, — always hidden in the sea, save 
when half drawn forth on one occasion by the god Thor ; 
outside the snake a broader ring of ice-mountains swept 
round both land and ocean, and formed the outer frame of the 
world, — for there lay only blank space beyond ; and over 



AND THE REVEALED. 369 

all, the sun and moon performed their journeys, chased 
through the sky by ravenous wolves, that ever sought to 
devour them. Such was the wild dream of our Scandi- 
navian ancestors, — a dream, however, that occupied as 
prominent a place in their Edda as any of their other 
religious beliefs, and which, with the first dawn of science, 
would not only have fallen itself, but would have also 
dragged down the others along w^ith it. 

Now this physical department has ever proved the vul- 
nerable portion of false religions, — the portion which, if I 
may use the metaphor, their originators could not dip in 
the infernal river. The ability of drawing the line, in the 
early and ignorant ages of the world, between what man 
can of himself discover and what he cannot, is an ability 
which man cannot possibly possess. The ancient Chaldeans, 
who first watclied the motions of the planets, could not 
possibly have foreseen, that while on the one hand men 
would be one day able of themselves to measure and weigh 
these bodies, and to determine their distances from the 
earth and from each other, men might never be able of 
themselves to demonstrate the fact of their authorship, or 
to discover the true character of their author. Xay, if 
they could have at all thought on the subject, the latter 
would have seemed to them by much the simpler discovery 
of the two. To know at such a time what was in reality 
discoverable and what was not, would be to know by 
anticipation what is not yet kno^\T3, — the limits of all 
human knowledge. It would be to trace a line non-existent 
at the j)eriod, and untraceable, in the nature of things, 
until the history of the human race shall be completed. It 
was held by even the sagacious Socrates, that men cannot 
arrive at any certainty in questions respecting the form or 
motion of the earth, or the mechanism of the heavens ; and 
60 he set himself to elucidate what he deemed much simpler 



370 THE DISCOVERABLE 

matters, — to prove, for instance, as we find in the Phedon, 
that human souls existed ere they came to inhabit their 
mortal bodies, and retained faint recollections of great mis- 
fortunes that had overtaken them ere their embodiment as 
men, and of sufferings to which they had been subjected in 
a primevous state. And lacking this ability of distinguish- 
ing between the naturally discoverable and what cannot be 
naturally discovered, the originators of the old mythologic 
beliefs obtruded into provinces in which ultimately the law- 
less nature of the obtrusion could not fail to be detected ; 
and thus, by making their false science a portion of their 
false religion, they created what was afterwards to prove 
its weakest and most vulnerable part. We absolutely know 
that the course at present pursued by enlightened Christian 
missionaries in India is to bring scientific truth into direct 
antagonism with the monstrously false science of the pre- 
tended revelations of Parseeism, Brahminism, and Buddh- 
ism; and that by this means the general falsity of these 
systems has been so plainly shown, that it has become a 
matter of doubt whether a single educated native of any 
considerable ability in reality believes in them. They seem 
to have lost their hold of all the minds capable of appre- 
ciating the weight and force of scientific evidence. 

Let us further remark, that since it seems inevitable 
that pretended revelations of ancient date should pledge 
themselves to a false science, the presumption must be 
strong that an ancient revelation of great multiplicity of 
detail, which has not so pledged itself, is not a false, but 
a true revelation. Nay, if we find in it the line drawn 
between what man can know of himself and what he cannot 
know, and determine that this line was traced in a remote 
and primitive age, we have positive evidence in the circum- 
stance, good so far as it extends, of its Divine origin. 
Kow, it will be ultimately found that this line was drawn 



AND THE REVEALED. 371 

with exquisite precision in the Hebrew Scriptures, — not 
merely the most ancient works that profess to be reve- 
lations, but absolutely the most ancient of all writings. 
Unfortunately, however, what God seems to have done for 
his Revelation, influential theologians of both the Romish 
and Orthodox Churches have labored hard to undo ; and, 
from their mistaking, in not a few remarkable passages, tlie 
scope and object of the vouchsafed message, they have at 
various times striven to j^ledge it to a science as false as 
even that of Buddhist, Teuton, or Hindu. And so, not 
only has the argument been weakened and obscured which 
might be founded on the rectitude of the line drawn of old 
between what ought and what ought not to be the subject 
of revelation, but even a positive argument has been fur- 
nished to the infidel, — ever ready to identify the glosses 
of the theologian with the enunciations of revelation itself, 
— similar to that which the Christian missionary directs 
agauist the false religions of India. It may be well briefly 
to inquire how this unlucky mistake has originated. 

It is of first importance often to the navigator that he 
should have a good chronometer, seeing that his ability of 
determining his exact position on wide seas, and, in conse- 
quence, of determining also the exact place and bearing of 
the rocks and reefs which he must avoid, and of the lands 
and harbors on which he must direct his course, must very 
much depend upon the rectitude of his instrument. But 
it may be of very little importance to him to know how 
chronometers are made. And so a friend may reveal to 
him where the best chronometers are to be purchased, with 
the name of the maker, without at the same time revealing 
to him the principle on which they are constructed. Let 
Tis suppose, however, that from some i^eculiarity in the 
mode of the revelation, the navigator has come to believe 
that it includes both items, — an enunciation regarding the 



372 THE DISCOVERABLE 

place where and tlie maker from whom the best chronome- 
ters are to be had, and a fmther enunciation regarding the 
true mechanism of chronometers. Let us suppose further, 
that while the good faith and intelligence of his friend are 
unquestionable, the supposed revelation regarding the con- 
struction of chronometers, which he thinks he owes to 
dim, is altogether erroneous and absurd. The chronome- 
ter mainly differs from the ordinary watch in being formed 
of a mixture of metals, which preserve so nice a chemical 
balance, that those changes of temperature which quicken 
or retard the movements of common time-pieces fail to 
affect it. Now, let us suppose that the friend and adviser 
of the sailor had said to him, — using a common meton- 
ymy, — there are no chronometers anywhere constructed 
that so completely neutralize the temperature as the ones I 
recommend to you ; and that the sailor had at once leaped 
to the conclusion, that the remark was authority enough 
for holding that it is the principle of chronometers, not to 
be composed of such counteractive combinations of metals 
as that the expansion of one shall be checked by the con- 
traction of another, but to keep up an equal temperature 
within through a heat-engendering quality in the amalga- 
mated metals. Such a mistake might be readily enough 
originated in this way ; and yet it would be a very serious 
mistake indeed ; seeing that it would substitute an active 
for a passive principle, — a principle of equalizing the tem- 
perature by acting uj^on it, for a principle of inert impassi- 
biUty to the temperature. And of course not only would 
the sailor himself be in error in taking such a view, but he 
might seriously compromise the intelligence or integrity of 
his friend in the judgment of all Avho held, on his testi- 
mony, that it was with liis friend, and not from his owm 
misconception of his friend's meaning, that the view had 
Oi-iginate J. And how, let us ask, ere dismissing our length- 



AND THE REVEALED. 373 

ened illustration, is an error such as the supposed one here 
to be tested, and its erroneousness exposed ? There can be 
but one reply to such a query. It might be wholly in vain 
to fall back upon the ^}:)5^ss^ma verba of the revelation 
made by the sailor's friend. Though in reahty but an 
enunciation regarding the authorship of certain chronome^ 
ters, it might possibly enough appear, fi-om its metonymic 
character, to be also a revelation regarding the construc- 
tion of chronometers. The sailor's error respecting the 
construction of chronometers is to be tested and exposed, 
not by any references to Avhat his friend had said, but by 
the art of the chronometer maker. The demonstrable prm- 
ciples of the art, as practised by the makers of chronome- 
ters, must be the test of all supposed revelations regarding 
the principles and mechanism of chronometer making. 

I^ow, it will be found that those mistakes of the theolo- 
gians to which I refer have been exactly similar to that of 
the navigator in the supposed case, and that they are mis- 
takes which must be corrected on exactly the same prin- 
ciple. The departments in which the mistakes have been 
made, have, as in the false religions, been chiefly three, — 
the geographic, astronomic, and geologic provinces. The 
geographic errors are of comparatively ancient date. They 
belong mainly to the later patristic and earlier middle ages, 
A\'hcn the monk Cosmas, as the geographer of the Church, 
represented the earth as a parallelogrammical plain, twice 
longer than it was broad, deeply indented by the inland 
seas, — the Mediterranean, the Caspian, the Red Sea, and 
the Persian Gulf, — and encompassed by a rectangular 
trench occupied by the oceans. Some of my audience 
will, however, remember that of the council of clergymen 
which met in Salamanca in 1486 to examine and test the 
views of Christopher Columbus, a considerable portion 
held it to be grossly heterodox to believe that by sailing 
32 



374 



THE DISCOVERABLE 



westwards the eastern parts of the world could be reached. 
No one could entertain such a view without also believmg 
that there were antipodes, and that the world was round, 

Fig. 114. 




THE GEOGRAPHY OF COSMAS.* 

(From a reduced facsimile of the original print in the British Museum.) 

not flat, — errors denounced by not only great theologians 
of the golden age of ecclesiastical learning, such as Lactan- 
tius and St. Augustine, but also directly opposed, it was 
said, to the very letter- of Scripture. "They observed," 
says Washington Irving, in his " Life of Columbus," " that 
in the Psalms the heavens are said to be extended like a 
hide, — that is, according to commentators, the curtain 
or covering of a tent, which among the ancient pastoral 
nations was formed of the hides of animals ; and that St. 
Paul, in his Epistle to the Hebrews, compares the heavens 



* 1. The great surrounding oceans. 
2 Caspian Sea. 
3. River Pliison. 
4-1. Points of the Compass. 
5. Mediterranean Sea. 



6. Red Sea. 

7-8. Persian Gulf, witli the rivers 

Tigris and Euphrates. 

9. River Gihon. 



AND THE REVEALED 



375 



to a tabernacle or tent extended over the earth, which they 
thence inferred must be flat." In the sectional view of 
Cosnias the heavens are represented as a semicircular vault 
or tent raised on perpendicular walls; a vast mountain 

Fig. 115. 




THE HEAVEXS AND EARTH OF COSMAS.* 

{Sectional View.) 

beyond the " Great Sea," lofty as the innermost continent 
of the Buddhist cosmogony, rises immediately under it ; 
when the sun passed behind this mountain it was night, 
and when it emerged from it it was day. And certainly 
under the crystal box of the monk it would be in vain to 
attempt, by passing westwards, to arrive at the far east. 
The cosmogony of Cosmas was also that of the doctors of 
Salamanca ; and the views of Columbus were denounced as 
heterodox because they failed to conform to it. Such was 



* 1. The sun Occident. 

2. The sun orient. 

3. The Heavens. 

- 4. Great mountain behind which 
the sun is hidden when it is 
night. 

5. The lileditcrranean Sea. 



6. Red Sea. 

7. Persian Gulf. 

8. Garden of Eden. 

9. Great surrounding ocean 
10. The Creator looking down 

upon his work, and seeing 
that all was good. 



S76 THE DISCOVERABLE 

one of the earlier mistakes of the theologians. When 
merely told regarding the authorship of the chronometer, 
they held that they had been told also respecting the mech- 
anism of the chronometer. Attaching literal meanings to 
what we now recognize as merely poetic or oratorical fig- 
ures, they believed that not only Avas it revealed to them 
that God had created the heavens and earth, but also that 
he had created the earth in the form of an extended plain, 
and placed a semi-globular heavens over it, just as one 
places a semi-globular case of glass over a piece of flower- 
plot or a miniature thicket of fern. And how, I ask, was 
this error ultimately corrected? Simply by that science 
of the geographer w^hich demonstrates that the earth is 
not flat, but spherical, and that the heavens have not 
edges, like a skin-tent or glass-case, to come anywhere in 
contact with it, but consist mainly of a difi'used atmos- 
phere, with illimitable space beyond. 

The second great error to which the theologians would 
fain have pledged the truth of Scripture was an error in 
the astronomical province. I need scarce refer to the 
often-adduced case of Galileo. The doctrine which the 
philosopher had to " abjure, curse, and detest," and which 
he was never again to teach, " because erroneous, heretical, 
and contrary to Scripture," was the doctrine of the earth's 
motion and the sun's stability. But to the part taken by 
our Protestant divines in the same controversy, — men still 
regarded as authorities in their own proper walk, — I must 
be allowed to refer, as less known, though not less in- 
structive, than that enacted by the Romish Church in the 
case of Galileo. *' This, we affirm, that is, that the earth 
rests, and the sun moves daily around it," said Voetius, 
a great Dutch divine of the middle of the seventeenth 
century, " with all divines, natural philosophers, Jews and 
Mohammedans, Greeks and Latins, excepting one or two 



AND THE REVEALED. 377 

of the ancients, and the modern followers of Copernicus." 
And we detect Heideggeri, a Swiss theologian, who flour- 
ished about half an age later, giving expression, a few 
years ere the commencement of the last century, to a simi- 
lar view, as the one taken by himself and many others, and 
as a view " from which," he states, " our pious reverence 
for the Scriptures, the word of truth, will not allow us to 
depart." A still more remarkable instance occurs in Tur- 
rettine, whom we find in one of his writings arguing in 
the strictly logical form, " in opposition to certain philoso- 
phers," and in behalf of the old Ptolemaic doctrine that 
the sun moves in the heavens and revolves round the 
earth, while the earth itself remains at rest in the midst. 
"J^irs^," he remarks, " the sun is said in Scripture to move 
in the heavens, and to rise and set. 'The sun is as a 
bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a 
strong man to run a race.' ' The sim knoweth his going 
down.' 'The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down.' 
Secondly^ The «un by a miracle stood still in the time 
of Joshua ; and by a miracle it went back in the time of 
Hezekiah. Thirdly^ The earth is said to be fixed immov- 
ably. 'The earth is also established that it cannot be 
moved.' ' Thou hast established the earth, and it abid- 
etli.' ' They continue tliis day according to their ordi- 
nance.' Fourthly^ Neither could birds, which often fly 
ofl" through an hour's circuit, be able to return to their 
nests. Fifthly^ Whatever flies or is suspended in the air 
ought (by this theory) to move from west to east ; but this 
is proved not to be true, from birds, arrows shot forth, 
atoms made manifest in the sun, and down floating in the 
atmosphere." The theologian, after thus laying down the 
law, sets himself to meet objections. If it be urged that 
the Scriptures in natural things speak according to the 
common opinion, Tm-rettine answers, ''''Firsts The Spirit of 
32* 



878 THE DISCOVERABLE 

God best understands natural things. Secondly^ That in 
giving instruction in religion, he meant these things should 
be used, not abused. Thirdly^ That he is not the author 
of any error. Fourthly^ Neither is he to be corrected on 
the pretence of our blind reason." If it be further urged, 
that birds, the air, and all things are moved with the earth, 
he answers, '"'■First, That this is a mere fiction, since air is 
a fluid body; and secondly, if so, by what force would 
birds be able to go from east to west ? " 

Kow this I must regard as a passage as instructive as it 
is extraordinary. Turrettine was one of the most accom- 
plished theologians of his age ; nor is that age by any 
means a remote one. Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo, 
had all finished their labors long ere he published this pas- 
sage ; nay, at the time when his work issued from the 
Amsterdam press (1695), Isaac Newton had attained his 
fifty-third year; and fully ten years previous, Professor 
David Gregory, nephew of the inventor of the Gregorian 
telescope, had begun to teach, from his chair in the Univer- 
sity of Edinburgh, the doctrine of gravitation and the true 
mechanism of the heavens, as unfolded in the Newtonian 
philosophy. The learned theologian, had he applied him^ 
self to astronomical science, could have found at the timo 
very enlightened teachers ; but falling into exactly the mis 
take of the sailor of my illustration, or that into which, two 
centuries before, the doctors of Salamanca had fallen, hei 
set himself, instead, to contend with the astronomers, and, 
to the extent of his influence, labored to pledge revelatioi\ 
to an astronomy as false as that of the Buddhist, Hindu, or 
old Teuton. His mistake, I repeat, was exactly that of the 
sailor. Though in the Scri^^tures only the fact of the 
authorship of the great chronometer set in the heavens "to 
be a sign for seasons, and for days and years," is revealed, 
lie regarded liimself as also informed respecting the prin- 



AND THE REVEALED. 379 

ciples on which the chronometer was constracted, or at 
least respecting the true nature of its movements ; and 
several very important deductions may, I think, be drawn 
fi'om the carefully constructed passage in which he so un- 
wittingly records his error, and the grounds of it. In the 
first place, we may safely hold that the texts of Scripture 
quoted by so able a theologian are those which have most 
the appearance of being revelations to men respecting the 
motions of the heavenly bodies. We may conclusively 
infer, that if they do not reveal the character of those 
motions, then nowhere in Scripture is their character 
revealed. In the second place, it is obvious that the cited 
texts do not reveal the nature of the motions. It would be 
as rational to hold that our best almanacs reveal the Ptole- 
maic astronomy. In the scientific portion of our almanacs 
there occur many phrases which are perfectly well under- 
stood, and indicate very definitely what the writer really 
intends to express by them, that yet, taken literally, are not 
scientifically true. The words, "Sun rises," and "Sun 
sets," and "Moon rises," and "Moon sets," occur in every 
page ; there are two pages — those devoted to the months 
of March and September — in which the phrase occurs, 
" Sun crosses the equinoctial line ; " and further, in the 
other pages, such phrases as " Sun enters Aries," " Sun 
enters Taurus," "Sun enters Gemini," <fec., <fcc., are not 
nnfrequent. The phrase, "new moon," is also of common 
occurrence. And these phrases, interpreted after the 
manner of Turrettine, and according to their strict gram- 
matical meaning, would of course imply that the sun has a 
motion round our planet, — that the moon moves round it 
every twenty-four hours, — and that the earth is provided 
every month with a new satellite. And yet we know that 
none of these ideas are in the mind of the writer who, in 
compiling the almanac, employs the phrases. He employs 



380 THE DISCOVERABLE 

them to indicate, not the nature of the heavenly motions, 
but the exact time Avhen, from the several motions of the 
earth, the sun and moon are brought into certain apparent 
positions with respect to either the earth itself or to the 
celestial signs ; or to indicate the time at Avhich the moon 
completes its monthly revolution, and presents a wholly 
darkened disk to the earth. The commentator skilful 
enough to pledge the almanac, in virtue of the literal mean- 
ing of the specified phrases, to the old Ptolemaic hypothesis, 
would pledge it to a false science, which its author never 
held. And such, evidently, has been the part enacted by 
Turrettine and the elder theologians. The Scriptural 
phrases are in no degree more express respecting the motion 
of the sun and the other heavenly bodies than those of the 
almanac, which, we know, do not refer to motion at all, but 
to time. Nor are we less justified in holding that the cited 
Scriptures do not refer to motion^ but to authorship. In 
the third place, however, it is not by any mere reconsider- 
ation of the adduced passages that the error, once made, is 
to be corrected. In a purely astronomic question the 
appeal lies, not to Scripture, but to astronomic science. 
And in the fourth j^lace, the reasonings of Turrettine, when, 
quitting his own proper walk, he discourses, not as a theo- 
logian, but as a natural philosoj^her, are such as to read a 
lesson not wholly unneeded in the present day. They show 
how in a department in which it demanded the united life- 
long labors of a Kepler, Galileo, and Newton to elicit the 
truth, the hasty guesses of a great theologian, rashly ven- 
tured in a polemic spirit, gave form and body to but 
ludicrous error. It is not after a fishion so impetuous and 
headlong that the elaborately wrought key must be plied 
which unlocks the profound mysteries of nature. But of 
this more anon. 
Xet me remark in the passing, that while Turrettine, one 



AND THE REVEALED. 381 

of the greatest of theologians, failed, as we have seen, to 
find in Scripture the fact of astronomic constiiiction^ La 
Place, one of the greatest of the astronomers, failed in a 
manner equally signal to find in his science the fact of 
astronomic authorship. The profound Frenchman (whom 
Sir David Brewster well characterizes as " the philosopher 
to whom posterity will probably assign the place next to 
Newton "), by demonstrating that certain irregularities in 
the motion of the heavenly bodies, which had been sup- 
posed to indicate a future termination to the whole, were 
but mere oscillations, subject to periodic correction, and 
indicative of no such termination in consequence, demon- 
strated also that, from all that appears, the present astro- 
nomical movements might go on forever. And as he could 
find in the solar system no indications of an end, so was he 
imable, he said, to find in it any trace of a beginning. He 
failed in discovering in all astronomy the fact of authorship, 
just as Turrettine had failed in finding in all Scripture the 
fact of astronomic construction. And here lies, I am 
inclined to think, the true line between revelation and 
science, — a line drawn of old with a God-derived precision, 
which can be rightly appreciated neither by mere theolo- 
gians like Turrettine, nor by mere men of science like La 
Place, but which is notwithstanding fraught with an evi- 
dence direct in its bearing on the truth of Scripture. That 
great fact, moral in its influence, of the authorship of the 
heavens and earth, which the science of La Place failed of 
itself to discover, and which was equally unknown to the 
ancient philosophers, God has revealed. It is "through 
faith we understand that the worlds were formed by the 
word of God, so that things which are seen were not made 
of things which do appear." And, on the other hand, the 
great truths, physical in their bearing, to the discovery of 
which science is fully competent, God did not reveal, but left 



THE DISCOVERABLE 



them to be developed piecemeal by the unassisted human 
faculties. And that ability of nicely drawing the line 
between the two classes of truths in a very remote age of 
the world, which we find manifested in the oldest of the 
Scriptural books, I must regard as an ability which could 
have been derived only through inspiration, and from God 
alone. 

Let us, however, pursue our argument. Questions of 
geography, such as those entertained by the theologians of 
Salamanca, must be tested, we conclude, not by a revelation 
never intended by its Divine Author to teach geography, 
but by the findings of geographic science. Questions in 
astronomy, such as those which Turrettine and the oppo- 
nents of Galileo entertained, must be tried, we hold, not by 
a revelation never intended to teach astronomy, but by the 
findings of astronomic science. But how deal, I next ask, 
with the theologian who holds that geologic fact has been 
revealed to him ? Geology is as thoroughly a physical 
science as either geography or astronomy. Its facts are 
equally capable of being educed and established by the un- 
assisted human intellect. It seems quite as unlikely that 
it should have been made a special subject of revelation, in 
its character as a science, as either of these sciences ; or 
that the Une so nicely maintained with respect to them 
should have been transgressed with regard to it. In short, 
in order satisfactorily to answer our query, it seems but 
necessary satisfactorily to answer another, namely. What, 
in this special department, are truth and fact scientifically 
ascertained ? 

There are,, however, certain texts that appear to have a 
more direct bearing on the successive periods of the geolo- 
gist than any of those that were once held to refer to the 
form of the earth, or to the nature of the heavenly bodies, 
are now believed to have on geography or astronomy. 



AND THE REVEALED. 383 

N"© one now holds that there is a geography revealed in 
Scripture, or regards the cavils of the Salamanca doctors 
as other than mere aberrations of the human mind. Nor, 
save mayhap in the darker corners of the Greek and Romish 
Churches, are there men in the present day who hold that 
there is a revealed astronomy. The texts so confidently 
quoted by Turrettine, such as " The sun also ariseth and 
the sun goeth down," are regarded in every Protestant 
Church as simply tantamount, in their bearing on the ques- 
tion at issue, to the " Sun rises " and " Sun sets " of the 
almanac. But while the Scriptures do not reveal the form 
of the earth or the motions of the planets, they do reveal 
the fact that the miracle of creation was effected, not by a 
single act, but in several successive acts. And it is with 
the organisms produced by successive acts of creation, and 
the formations deposited during the periods in which these 
acts took place, that the geologist is called on by his 
science to deal. And hence, while there are now no 
attempts made to reconcile geographic or astronomic fact 
with the Scripture passages which refer, in the language 
of the time, to the glory of the heavens or the stability of 
the earth, just because it is held that there is really nothing 
geographic or astronomic in the passages to conflict with 
the geographic or astronomic facts, we still seek to reconcile 
the facts of geologic science with what is termed the MosaiQ 
geology. We inquire whether, in its leading features, the 
Mosaic does not correspond with the geologic record ; and 
whether the days of the retrospective prophecy of creation 
are to be regarded as coextensive with the vast periods of 
the geologist, or as merely representative portions of them, 
or as literal days of twenty-four hours each ? But though 
we thus seek to harmonize the two records, we continue to 
regard their grounds and objects as entirely different. The 
object of geology is simply the elucidation of the history of 



384 THE DISCOVERABLE 

the earth, and of the story of its various creations ; and its 
grounds are, like those of astronomy or geography, or of 
any other physical science, facts and inferences scientifically 
determined or deduced; while, on the other hand, the 
grounds of the Mosaic record are those on which the other 
Scriptures rest, and which have been so well laid down in 
what we may term the higher literature of the "Evidences," 
while at least some of its objects, — for who shall declare 
them all ? — seem to be, first, to establish the all-important 
fact of the Divine authorship of the universe, and to show 
that all its various forces are not self-existent, but owe their 
origin to a Great First Cause; next, to exhibit the pro- 
gressive character of God's workings, — a character which 
equally applies to his works of creation and providence; 
and, in the third place, to furnish a basis and precedent, in 
the Divine example, for that institution of the Sabbath 
which bears not only a prophetic reference to the great 
dynasty to come, — last of all the dynasties, and of which 
re-created men are to be the happy subjects, and the Divine 
Man the adorable Monarch, — but which has also been 
specially established in order that right preparation may be 
made for the terminal state which it symbolizes and fore- 
shadows. Here, as certainly as in the other physical 
sciences, the line has been drawn with perfect precision 
between what man could and what he could not have 
known of himself. What he could have known, and in 
part already knows, is geologic science ; what in all proba- 
bility he never could have known is the fact of the Divine 
authorship of the universe, and the true nature of the 
institution of the Sabbath, as a time of preparation for the 
final state, and as alike representative of God's workings in 
the past, and of his eternally predetermined scheme for the 
future. "Is it not certain," Socrates is represented as 
inquiring, in " the first Alcibiades," of his gay and confident 



AND THE REVEALED. 385 

pupil, " that you know nothing but what has been told you 
by others, or what you have found out for yourself?" 
There is at once exquisite simplicity and great terseness in 
this natural division of the only modes in which men can 
acquire knowledge ; and we find it wonderfully exemplified 
in all revelation. Scripture draws practically a broad line 
between the two modes ; and while it tells man all that is 
necessary to his wants and welfare as a religious creature, it 
does not communicate to him a single scientific fact which 
he is competent to find out for himself. 

About an age j)revious to the times of Turrettine, the 
danger of "corrupting philosophy through an intermixed 
divinity " was admirably shown by Bacon in his " Novum 
Organum;" and the line indicated was exactly what we 
now find was laid down of old with such precision in 
Scripture. "To deify error and to adore vain things," 
said the great philosopher, "may be well accounted the 
plague of the understanding. Some modern men, guilty 
of much levity, have so indulged this vanity, that they 
have essayed to find natural philosophy in the first chapter 
of Genesis, the Book of Job, and other places of holy writ, 
seeking the living among the dead. Now this vanity is so 
much the more to be checked and restrained, because, by 
unadvised mixture of Divine and human things, not only a 
phantastical philosophy is produced, but also an heretical 
religion. Therefore it is safe to give unto Faith, with a 
sober mind, the things that are Faith's." The passage, 
partially quoted, has been not unfrequently misapplied, as 
if it bore, not against theologians such as Turrettine and 
the Franciscans, but against theologians such as Chalmers, 
Dr. Bird Sumner, and Dr. Pye Smith, — not against the 
men who derive a false science from Scripture, into which 
God never introduced natural science of any kind, but 
against the men who, having sought and acquired their 
33 



386 THE DISCOVERABLE 

science where it is alone to be found, have striven to bring 
Scripture, in the misinteriDreted passages, into harmony 
with its findings. Taken, however, as a whole, its true 
meaning is obvious. It is the men Avho have " essayed to 
find natural philosophy" positively revealed in Genesis and 
the other sacred books, — not the men who have merely 
,shown that there is nothing in Scripture which conflicts 
with the natural philosophy legitimately found elsewhere, — 
that are obnoxious to the censure conveyed in the remark. 
It is they only, and not the others, that are '"'' phantasticaV 
in their philosophy and ''^ hereticaV in their religion. I 
say heretical in their religion. The Ptolemaic doctrine 
which ascribed to the earth a central place in the universe 
was only scientifically false, whereas the same doctrine in 
Turrettine and the Franciscans, from the circumstance that 
they j^ledged the Scripture to its falsity, and professed to de- 
rive it direct from revelation, was not only scientifically false, 
but a heresy to boot. And, in like manner, it is the class 
who term themselves the "Mosaic geologists," — men such 
as the Granville Penns, Moses Stewarts, Eleazar Lords, 
Dean Cockburns, and Peter Macfarlanes, — who essay to 
" find natural philosophy in the first chapter of Genesis," 
and that too a demonstrably false natural philosophy, who 
are obnoxious to the Baconian censure now. No true 
geologist ever professes to deduce his geology from Scrip- 
ture. It is from the earth's crust, with its numerous 
systems, always invariable in their order, and its successive 
groups of fossil remains, always (in accordance with their 
place and age) of a certain determinable character, — not 
in a revelation never intended by its Divine Author to 
teach any natural science as such, — that he derives the 
materials with which he builds. Had there been no Divine 
Revelation, geology would be as certainly what it now is 
as either geography or astronomy. That it comes in the 



AND THE REVEALED. 387 

present time more in contact with revealed truth than 
either of these sciences, is, as I have shown, merely a 
consequence of the fact that there is a history given in the 
opening passages of Scripture, for far other than geological 
purposes, of the authorship of the heavens and earth, and 
of the successive stages of creation ; and further, from the 
circumstance that, from various motives, men are ever and 
anon inquiring how the geologic agrees with the Scriptural 
record. It may be well here to remind the anti-geologists, 
in connection with this part of my subject, of what at the 
utmost they may hope to accomplish. Judging from all I 
have yet seen of their wi'itings, they seem to be as certainly 
impressed by the belief that they are settling teztually the 
geologic question of the world's antiquity, as the doctors 
of Salamanca held that they were settling textually the 
question of the world's form ; or Turrettine and the Fran- 
ciscans, that they were settling textually the question of 
the world's motion, or rather want of motion. But the 
mistake is quite as gross in their case as in that of Turret- 
tine and the doctors. Geology rests on a broad, ever 
extending basis of evidence, Avholly independent of the 
revelation on which they profess, very unintelligently, in 
all the instances I have yet known, to found their objec- 
tions. What they need at most promise themselves is, to 
defeat those attempts to reconcile the two records w^hich 
are made by geologists who respect and believe the Scrip- 
ture testimony, — not a very laudable feat, even could it be 
accomplished, and certainly worthy of being made rather a 
subject of condolence than of congratulation. And though, 
of course, men should pursue the truth simply for its own 
sake, and independently either of the consequences which 
it may be found to involve, or of the company with which 
it may bring them acquainted, the anti-geologists might 
be worse employed than in scanning the character and 



388 THE DISCOVERABLE 

aims of the associates with whom they virtually league 
themselves when they declare war against the Christian 
geologist. 

There are three different parties in the field, either di- 
rectly opposed, or at least little friendly, to the men who 
honestly attempt reconciling the Mosaic with the geologic 
record. First, there are the anti-geologists, — men who 
hold that geological questions are to be settled now as the 
Franciscans contemporary with Galileo held that astronomi- 
cal questions were to be settled in the seventeenth century, 
or as the doctors of Salamanca contemporary with Columbus 
held that geographic questions were to be settled in the 
fifteenth. And they believe that geology, as interpreted 
by the geologists, is entirely false, because, as they think, 
irreconcilable with Scripture ; further, that our planet had 
no existence some seven or eight thousand years ago, — 
that the ajoparent antiquity of the various sedimentary 
systems and organic groups of the earth's crust is wholly 
illusive, — and that the very oldest of them cannot be more 
than a few days older than the human period. In fine, 
just as it was held two centuries ago by Turrettine and 
the Franciscans, that the Bible as interpreted by them was 
the only legitimate authority in astronomic questions, so 
this class now hold that the Bible as interpreted by them is 
the only legitimate authority in geologic questions; and 
further, that the Bible being, as they contend, wholly 
opposed to the deductions of the geologist, these deduc- 
tions must of necessity be erroneous. Next, there is a 
class, more largely represented in society than in literature, 
who, looking at the general bearings of the question, the 
cliaracter and standing of the geologists, and the sublime 
nature of their discoveries, believe that geology ranks as 
certainly among the sciences as astronomy itself; but who, 
little in earnest in their religion, are quite ready enough, 



AND THE REVEALED. 38& 

when they find theologians asserting the irreconcilability 
of the geologic doctrines with those of Scripture, to believe 
them ; nay, not only so, but to repeat the assertion. It is 
not fashionable in the present age openly to avow infidelity, 
save mayhap in some modified rationalistic or pantheistic 
form ; but in no age did the thing itself exist more exten- 
sively ; and the number of individuals is very great who, 
while they profess an outward respect for revelation, have 
no serious quarrel with the class who, in their blind zeal in 
its behalf, are in reality undermining its foundations. Nor 
are there avowed infidels awanting who also make common 
cause with the party so far as to assert that the results of 
geologic discovery conflict irreconcilably with the Mosaic 
account of creation. But there is yet another class, com- 
posed of respectable and able men, who, from the natural 
influence of their acquirements and talents, are perhaps 
more dangerous allies still, and whom we find represented 
by writers such as Mr. Babbage and the Rev. Baden 
Powell. It is held by both these accomplished men, that 
it is in vain to attempt reconciling the Mosaic writings 
with the geologic discoveries : both are intimately ac- 
quainted Yfiih the evidence adduced by the geologist, and 
entertain no doubt whatever regarding what it establishes ; 
but though in the main friendly to at least the moral 
sanctions of the New Testament, both virtually set aside 
the Mosaic cosmogony; the one (Mr. Babbage) on the 
professed grounds that we really cannot arrive with any 
certainty at the meaning of that old Hebrew introduction 
to the Scriptures in which the genesis of things is described ; 
and the other (Mr. Powell) on the assumption that that 
introduction is but a mere picturesque myth or parable, as 
little scientifically true as the parables of our Saviour or of 
Nathan the seer are historically so. Now, I cannot think 
that the anti-geologists are quite in the place in which they 
33* 



390 THE DISCOVERABLE 

either ought or intend to be when engaged virtually in 
making common cause with either of these latter classes.* 
Be this as it may, however, it may be not uninstructive, 
and perhaps not wholly unamusing, to examine what the 
claims really are of some of our later anti-geologists to be 
recognized as the legitimate and qualified censors of geolo- 
gic fact or inference. It will be seen, that in the passage 
which I have quoted from Turrettine, the theologian, in 
three of his five divisions, restricts himself to the theologic 
province, and that when in his own proper sphere even his 
errors are respectable; but that in the two concluding 
divisions he passes into the province of the natural philoso- 
pher, and that there his respectability ceases for the time, 
and he becomes eminently ridiculous. The anti-geologists, 
— men of considerably smaller calibre than the massive 
Dutch divine of the seventeenth century, — also enter into 
a field not their own. Passing from the theologic prov- 
ince, they obtrude into that of the geologist, and settle 

* The very different terms which Mr. Powell employs in characterizing 
the anti-geologists, from those which he makes use of in denouncing the 
men honestly bent on reconciling the enunciations of revelation with the 
findings of geologic science, — a class which included in the past, divines 
such as Chalmers, Buckland, and Pye Smith, and comprises divines such 
as Hitchcock and the Archbishop of Canterbury now, — is worthy of being 
noted. In two sermons, " Christianity without Judaism," written by this 
clergyman of the Church of England, to show that all days of the week 
are alike, and the Christian Sabbath a mere blunder, I find the following 
passage : — " Some divines have consistently rejected all geology and all 
science as profane and carnal; and some even, when pretending to call 
themselves men of science, have stooped to the miserable policy of tam- 
pering with the truth, investing the real facts in false disguises, to cringe 
to the prejudices of the many, and to pervert science into a seeming ac- 
cordance with popular prepossessions." I cannot believe that this will be 
regarded as justifiable language : it seems scarce worthy of a man of 
science ; and will, I fear, only be accepted as good in evidence that the 
tdium tlxedlogicum is not restricted to what is termed the orthodox side of 
ttie Church. 



AND THE REVEALED. 391 

against him, apparently after a few minutes' consideration, 
or as mere special pleaders, questions on which he has been 
concentrating the patient study and directing the laborious 
explorations of years. And an exhibition by specimen of 
the nonsense to which they have in this way committed 
themselves in their haste, may not be wholly uninstructive. 
But I must defer the display till another evening. I shall 
do them no injustice ; but I trust it will be forgiven me 
should I exhibit, as they have exhibited themselves, a class 
of writers to whose assaults I have submitted for the last 
fourteen years without provocation and without reply. 



LECTURE TENTH. 

THE GEOLOGY OF THE ANTI-GEOLOGISTS. 

It lias been well remarked, that that writer would 
be equally in danger of error who would assign very ab- 
struse motives for the conduct of great bodies of men, or 
very obvious causes for the great phenomena of nature. 
The motives of the masses, — on a level always with the 
average comprehension, — are never abstruse; the causes 
of the phenomena, on the other hand, are never obvious. 
And when these last are hastily sought after, not from any 
devotion to scientific truth, or any genuine love of it, but 
for some purpose of controversy, we may receive it as a 
sure and certain fact that they will not be found. Some 
mere plausibility will be produced instead, bearing on its 
front an obviousness favorable mayhap to its reception for 
the time by the vulgar, but in reality fatal to its claims in 
the estimate of all deep thinkers ; while truth will mean- 
while lie concealed far below, in the bottom of her well, 
until patiently solicited forth by some previously unthought 
of process, in the character of some wholly unanticipated 
result. Such, in the history of science, has been the course 
and character of error on the one hand, and of actual dis- 
covery on the other : the error has been always compara- 
tively obvious, — the discovery unexpected and abstruse. 
And as men descend in the scale of accomiDlishment or 
intellect, a nearer and yet nearer approximation takes place 
between their conceptions of the causes of the occult 



THE GEOLOGY OF ANTI-GEOLOGISTS. 393 

processes of nature, and the common and obvious motives 
which influence large masses of theu' fellows; until at 
length the sublime contrivances of the universe sink, in 
their interpretation of them, into the clumsy expedients of 
a bungling mechanism. 

Tested by their reading of the phenomena on this prin- 
ciple, we find curious gradations between the higher and 
the humbler orders of minds. The vortices of Descartes, 
for instance, involve but a simple idea, that might have 
been struck out by almost any mdividual of a tolerably 
lively fancy, who had walked by the side of a winding 
river, and seen sticks and straws revolving in its eddies. 
But no fancy, however active, or no reach of mere com- 
mon sense, however respectable, could have originated, or 
conducted to a successful conclusion, that profound con- 
templation into which Newton fell in the garden of Wools- 
thorpe, when he saw the loosened aj^ple drop from the 
tree, and succeeded in demonstrating that the planets are 
retained in their orbits by the same law which impels a 
falling pebble towards the ground. So little obvious, in- 
deed, was the Newtonian scheme, that most of the con- 
temporary generation of philosophers, — some of them, 
such as Fontenelle and his brother academicians of France, 
men of no mean standing, — died rejecting it. And the 
objections of Turrettine to the motion of the earth on its 
axis are, we find, still more obvious than even the idea of 
the vortices. It does at first seem natural enough to sup- 
pose, that if the earth's surface be speeding eastwards at 
the rate of several hundred miles in the hour (a thousand 
miles at the equator), the birds which flutter over it should 
be somewhat in danger of being left behind; and that 
atoms and down flakes floating in the atmosphere in a time 
of calm, instead of appearing, as they often do, either in a 
state of rest, or moving with equal freedom in every direo 



394 THE GEOLOGY OF 

tion, ought to be seen hurrying westwards, as if puffed by 
the breath of a tornado. Such an objection must for a 
time have appeared as just as it seems obvious, especially 
in one's study on a Saturday night, with much of one's lec- 
ture still to write, and the Sabbath too near to permit of 
verification or experiment. Fontenelle, however, though 
he could not get over the difficulty of conceiving how the 
same gravitation which made a stone fall also kept the 
moon in its place, fairly surmounted that which puzzled 
Turrettine ; and in his " Plurality of Worlds," — a publi- 
cation of the same age as the " Compendium Theologica," 
— he makes his Marchioness surmount it too. " ' But I 
have a difficulty to solve,' he represents the lady as saying, 
*and you must be serious. As the earth moves, the air 
changes every moment ; so we breathe the air of another 
country.' 'Not at all,' replied I; *for the air wliich encom- 
passes the earth follows with us, and turns with us. Have 
you not seen the labors of the silkworm? The shell or 
cocoon which it weaves around itself with so much art is 
of a doAvn very loose and soft ; and so the earth, which is 
solid, is covered, from the surface twenty leagues upwards, 
with a kind of down, which is the air, and, Hke the shell of 
the silkworm, turns along with it.'" Even Turrettine, 
however, was as far in advance of some of our contemners 
of science in the present day, as Fontenelle was in advance 
of Turrettine, or Il^ewton in advance of Fontenelle. The 
old theologian could scarce have held, with a living ecclesi- 
astic of the Romish Church in Ireland, Father CuUen, that 
the sun is possibly only a fathom in diameter; or have 
asserted with a most Protestant lecturer who addressed an 
audience in Edinburgh little more than three years ago, 
that, though God created all the wild animals, it was the 
devil who made the flesh-eaters among them fierce and car- 
nivorous; and, of course, shortened their bowels, length- 



J 



THE ANTI-GEOLOGISTS. S95 

ened their teeth, and stuck formidable claws into the points 
of their digits.* Further, the error of Turrettine Avas but 
that of his age, whereas our modern decriers of scientific 
fact and inference are always men greatly in the rear of 
theirs, and as far inferior to the ancient assertors of the same 
errors as the few untutored peasants and fishermen of our 
own time, located in remote parts of the country, who still 
retain the old faith in witchcraft, are inferior to the great 
lawyers, poets, and divines, — the Fairfaxes, Henry Mores, 
Judge Haleses, and Sir George Mackenzies, — who in the 
seventeenth century entertained a similar belief. And so it 
may seem somewhat idle work to take any pains in " scat- 
tering" such a "rear of darkness thin" as this forlorn pha- 
lanx composes. "Let them alone," said a lunatic in the 
lucid fit, to a soldier who had told him, when' asked why 
he carried a sword, that it was to kill his enemies, — " let 
them alone, and they will all die of themselves." But 
though very inconsiderable, there is a comparatively large 
proportion of the class perilously posted, on both sides of 
the Atlantic, in what used to be termed of old in Scotland 



* The gentleman here referred to lectured no later than October, 1853, 
against the doctrmes of the geologists ; and modestly chose as the scene 
of his labors the city of Hutton and Playfair. What he set himself 
specially to "demonstrate" was, -as he said, that the geologic "theodes as 
to antiquity of the earth, successive eras, &.C., were not only fallacious and 
unphilosophical, but rendered nugatory the authority of the sacred Scrip- 
tures." Not only, however, did he exert himself in demolishing the geol- 
ogists as infidel, but he denounced also as unsound the theology of good 
old Isaac "Watts. The lines taught us in our infancy, — 

" Let dogs delight to bark and bite, 
For God hath made them so," 

were, he remarked, decidedly heterodox. They ought to have run in- 
stead, — 

" Let dogs delight to bark and bite, 
Satan hath made them so " III 



396 THE GEOLOGY OF 

"the chair of verity;" and there they sometimes succeed 
in doing harm, all unwittingly, not to the science which 
they oppose, but to the religion which they profess to 
defend. I was not a little struck lately by finding in a 
religious periodical of the United States, a worthy Episco- 
palian clergyman bitterly complaining, that whenever his 
sense of duty led him to denounce from his pulpit the 
gross infidelity of modern geology, he could see an unbe- 
lieving grin rising on the faces of not a few of his congre- 
gation. Alas! who can doubt that such ecclesiastics as 
this good clergyman must virtually be powerful preachers 
on the skeptical side, to all among their- people who, with 
intelligence enough to appreciate the geologic evidence, 
are still unsettled in their minds respecting that of the 
Christian faith. And so on this consideration alone it may 
be found not uninstructive to devote the address of the 
present evening to an exposure of the errors and nonsense 
of our modern anti-geologists, — the true successors and 
representatives, in the passing age, of the Franciscan and 
Salamanca doctors of the fifteenth and seventeenth cen- 
turies. 

Let me first remark, that no one need expect to be origi- 
nal simply by being absurd. There is a cycle in nonsense, 
as certainly as in opinion of a more solid kind, which ever 
and anon brings back the delusions and errors of an earlier 
time : the follies of the present day are transcripts, unwit- 
tingly produced, and with of course a few variations, of 
follies which existed centuries ago ; and it seems to be on 
this principle, — a consequence, mayhap, of the limited 
range of the human mind, not only in its elucidations of 
truth, but also in its forms of error, — that scarce an ex- 
planation of geologic phenomena has been given by the 
anti-geologists of our own times, that was not anticipated 
by writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuiies. It 



THE ANTI-GEOLOGISTS. 397 

was held, for instance, — in opposition to the great painter, 
Leonardo da Vinci, who flourished early in the sixteenth 
century, and was one of the first who, after the revival of 
learning, asserted the true character of organic remains, — 
that fossUs were formed in the rocks through the planetary 
influences, or a certain plastic force in nature, and had 
never entered into the composition of living creatures or 
plants. And this view obtained very generally till about 
the middle of the seventeenth century, when, save for a 
brief space long after, in the times of Voltaire, it ceased 
to be regarded as any longer tenable. Curiously enough, 
however, it was virtually reproduced by one of the extant 
anti-geologists, — a clergyman of the English Church, — 
only three years ago, in a publication written, he says, to 
counteract "the immense mischief occasioned by the infidel 
works of geologists, especially among the lower classes^"* 
and which he has termed "a brief and complete refuta- 
tion" of their "anti-scriptural theory."* "Fossils," says 
this courageous writer, "were not necessarily animated 
structures : " some of them were in all probability " formed 
of stone from the very first ; " others, of inanimate flesh 
and bone. " The mammoth found under the ice in arctic 
regions had not necessarily been a living creature : it was 
created under the ice, and then preserved in that peculiar 
foi-m of preservation, instead of being transmuted into 
stone, like the rest of its class." Such was the state of 
keeping of this famous mammoth, when discovered a little 
ere the beginning of the present century, that, as I had 
occasion formerly to remark, dogs and bears fed upon its 
flesh; and its bones, and part of its skin, covered with 
long red hair, are now in the museum of Petersburg. But 

* " A Brief and Complete Refutation of the Anti-Scriptural Theory of 
Geologists." By a Clergyman of the Church of England. London: 
Wertheim & Macintosh. 1853. 
34 



398 THE GEOLOGY OF 

there is no evidence whatever, according to this writer, 
that it had ever been a living creature : it was simply a 
created carcass. All organisms are, he holds, models or 
archetypes, fashioned during the first day in the depths 
of chaos, to typify or foreshadow the living plants and 
animals that were to be called into existence a few days 
later. " What," he asks, " do the cocoa-nuts, melons, and 
gourds, which have been found in the strata, show, but 
that the vegetable had its perfect archetype in chaos as 
well as the animal ? " Nay, further, the geologist has but 
got into the apartment in which the original architect 
stored up his plans and models, — many of them, how- 
ever, rejected ones. For " though every animal is formed 
after his archetype," we find him saying, "the converse 
is not true, that every chaotic structure is represented by 
its living facsimile.'^'* But they typify, if not living or- 
ganisms, much more important things, — " they represent," 
says our writer, " the land of the shadow of death ; " and 
the strata containing them, which geologists have opened, 
are symbolical of the "gates of death." "The state of 
preservation in which most fossils are, instead of having 
mouldered away, foreshadows inmiortality. The grada- 
tion, too, from the organisms whose types are said to he 
lost or destroyed, and confused in innumerable heaps, up 
to the perfect and complete specimen, is no fanciful rep- 
resentation of the resurrection; while the isolated bones 
and parts of skeletons which, though found far apart, as 
they were created, have been fitted together by the skill 
of the accomplished anatomist, give assurance of the fact 
that our scattered dust — our membra disjecta — shall come 
together at the sound of the last trump." And this is 
" geology on Scripture principles," soberly expounded by a 
man who respects facts, while he gives no place to fancy. 
The "English clergyman" then goes on to show in his 



THE ANTI-GEOLOGISTS. 399 

pamphlet, that the Coal Measures furnish no evidence of 
the earth's antiquity. They were formed, he says, by the 
finger of the Creator, " immediately and at once. A car- 
boniferous tree of gigantic size has been discovered," he 
adds, "in the interior of the earth, of such a shape as 
entirely to prove the absurdity of a theory [that of the 
earth's antiquity] which has not a single valid argument to 
support it. It is described as having its trunk rising from 
the earth perpendicularly ten feet, and then bending over 
and extending horizontally sixty feet. Now, what living 
tree thus lopsided could support such a weight in such a 
direction ? It seems to have been created on purpose to 
silence the horrid blasphemies of geologists ; for it proves 
to a demonstration, that the upper, nether, and surrounding 
matter came into existence with it at the same instant ; for 
how else could it have been preserved in such a position ? " 
The triumph secured by the carboniferous tree, however, — 
though it does not seem wholly impossible that a tree 
might in any age of the world have been broken over some 
ten feet fi'om its root, and bent in a horizontal position, — 
seems in some danger of being neutralized, as we read on, 
by the circumstance that, geologists find not unfrequently, 
among their fossils, the dung of the carnivorous vertebrates, 
charged in many instances with the teeth, bones, and scales 
of the creatures on which they had preyed, and strongly 
unpressed, in at least the coprolites of the larger Palaeozoic 
ganoids, and of the enaliosaurs of the Secondary period, by 
the screw-like markings of a spiral intestine, similar in form 
to that now exemplified by the sharks and rays. And in 
maintaining his hypothesis that most fossils are mere arche* 
types — mere plans or models — of existences to be, the 
archetypal dung proves rather a stumbling-block, and the 
English clergyman waxes exceedingly wroth against the 
geologists. " We cannot," he says, " believe in such things 



400 THE GEOLOGY OF 

as coprolites. They are only a curious form of matter 
commanded by Him who has made the flower to assume 
all shapes as well as all hues. He w^ho would not allow so 
much as a tool to be lifted up on the stones that composed 
his altar, would certainly not allow the work of animals to 
compose his creation, much less, then, their dung. The 
geological assertion that the Creator of this world formed 
it in some parts of coprolites savors very much of Satan or 
Beelzebub, the god of dung. Geologists could scarcely 
have made a more unfortunate self-refuting assertion than 
this." I question, however, whether the clergyman does 
well to be angry with the geologists here. That fossils are 
mere models and archetypes, is his hypothesis, not theirs ; 
and so it is he himself who is answerable, not they, for 
what he deems the impiety of the archetypal dung. His 
next statement is of a kind suited somewhat to astonish 
the practical geologist. "7^ is the constant language of 
geologists^'' he says, in giving the result of their discoveries, 
^''that no young have been found! ! ! while the larger fossils 
have been detected isolated, or in the company of others, 
all differing in kind." "Archetypal resemblances of ova 
have been found, and such things as moths; but these are 
distinct and perfect in their kind. The occurrence of the 
young, which are imperfect, is a fact which has not been, 
and never can be, established; therefore it never can he 
proved that this world has had a longer existence than six 
thousand years?^ It is " the constant language of geolo- 
gists" that "no young have been found" m the fossil state. 
Amazing assertion! "Therefore it never can be proved 
that this world has had a longer existence than six thou- 
sand years." Astonishing mference ! There is not a tyro 
in geology who ever looked over a set of fossUs, or ever 
spent an hour in exploring a fossiliferous deposit, who does 
not know that the remams of organisms in every stage of 



THE ANTI-GEOLOGISTS. 401 

growth may be found lying side by side in the same bed, — 
tliat ahiiost every museum contains its series of molluscs, 
crustaceans, fishes, and corals, formed to illustrate species 
in their various stages of growth, — that, in esj)ecial, among 
the ammonites of the Secondary ages, and the trilobites 
of the Palaeozoic ones, these series have been made with 
great care, in order to prevent the erroneous multiphcation 
of sjiccics, — and that, in short, every richly fossiliferous 
stratum in the earth's crust repeats the lesson so often 
deduced from our churchyards, where graves of all sizes, 
from that of the infant of a day to that of the aged adult, 
may be found lying side by side. What the English 
clergyman represents as " the constant language of geolo- 
gists," is a language which no geologist ever yet used, or 
ever will. And his inference is in every way worthy of 
his premises. The flourish with which he concludes his 
pamphlet would be infinitely amusing had his language 
been just a httle less solemn. "The writer of the above 
remarks has felt it his duty," we find him saying, "to 
publish them, not only to refute the arguments of the vain 
and puifed-up geologist, who fancies himself wiser than 
God, but also to prevent, by God's blessing, the evil that 
must ensue from tampering with the sacred text. And 
now, what has Satan to say? Why, the tables are 
TURNED. Let men beware. Why did not the British 
Association, at their twenty-third meeting, in September, 
1853, acknowledge their error as a body, in applauding so 
loudly the assertion of one of their geological members at a 
previous meeting, that this earth existed ages before man ? 
They may now have the satisfaction of thinking that, in 
spite of themselves, those impious plaudits have been turned 
by the wrath of God into hisses." Strange as the fact may 
seem, this passage Avas written, not in grave joke, but in 
serious earnest. 
34* 



402 THE GEOLOGY OF 

The belief that fossil remains had never entered into the 
composition of living organisms, but had been formed in 
the rocks just as we find them, gradually gave place, during 
the seventeenth century, to the belief that they were the 
debris of the Noachian Deluge, and evidences, as they 
occurred in almost every knowTi country, and were found 
on the top of lofty lulls, of at once its universality and 
the height to which its waters had prevailed. And this 
hypothesis, like the others, has been reproduced by some 
of the anti-geologists of the present day. The known fact, 
— a result of modern science, — that the several formations 
(always invariable in their order of succession) have their 
groups of organisms peculiar to themselves, has, however, 
interposed a difficulty from which the earlier cosmogonists 
were exempt. It has become necessary to show that the 
Noachian cataclysm was strangely selective, in burying in 
the beds which it is held by the class to have formed, now 
one group of plants and animals, now quite another group, 
and anon yet another and different group still ; and all this 
many times repeated with such nice' care and discrimination, 
that not a single organism of the lower beds is to be de- 
tected in the middle ones, nor yet a single organism of 
either the middle or lower in the beds that lie above. 
Even this task, however, just a little lightened by here 
and there a suppression of the facts, has been attempted by 
the redoubtable Dean of York.* Fu-e and water were, he 
conceives, equally agents in the great catastrophe that 
destroyed the old world, — a circumstance which, if truCj^ 
w^ould have furnished with an admirable apology the clast^ 
of persons who, according to the wit, would have cried out 
"Fire, fire," at the deluge. The dean conceives that at 
the commencement of tlie Flood, when torrents of rain 

* Newspaper Report of Meeting of the British Association held at York 
in September, 1814. 



THE ANTI-GEOLOGISTS. 403 

were falling upon the land, numerous submarine volcanoes 
began to disgorge their molten contents into the sea, 
destroying the fish, and all other marine productions, by 
the intensity of the heat, and at the same time locking 
them up in strata fonned of the erupted matter. This 
process took place ere the land floods, laden with the spoils 
of island and continent, and the accompanying mud and 
sand, could arrive at the remoter depths; which, however, 
they ultimately reached, and formed a second formation, 
overlying the first. There were thus two formations origi- 
nated, — a marine formation below, and a terrestrial or 
fresh water formation above; but as these two deposits 
could not be made to include all the geological phenomena 
with which even the dean was acquainted, he had nicely to 
parcel out the work of his volcanoes on the one hand, and 
that of his land floods on the other, into separate fits or 
paroxysms, each of which served to entomb a distinct class 
of creatures, and originate a definite set of rocks. Thus, 
the first work of his volcanoes was to form the Transition 
series of strata. As a commencement of the whole, the 
internal fire blew up from the bed of the ocean, in tremen- 
dous explosions, vast quantities of pulverized rock mixed 
with clay, which, slowly subsiding, and covering up, as it 
sank, shells, stone-lilies, and trilobites, formed the Silurian 
rocks. A second explosion brought up the vents of the 
volcanoes to the level of the ocean ; and while the Old Red 
Sandstone, thus produced, and charged with fish killed by 
the heat, was settling on their flanks, they themselves, as 
if seized by black vomit, began to disgorge in vast quanti- 
ties, coal in the hquid state. Very opportunely, just ere it 
cooled, emormous quantities of vegetables, washed out to 
sea by the extraordinary land floods, were precipitated 
immediately over it ; and, sticking in its viscid surface, or 
sinking into its substance through cracks formed in it 



404 THE GEOLOGY OF 

during the cooling, they became attached to it in such 
considerable masses, as to lead long after to the very mis- 
taken notion that coal itself was of vegetable origin. Then 
there ensued another deposit of red sand, with salt boiled 
into it ; and then a deposition of lime and clay. The Jand 
floods stiU continuing, the great Sauroid reptiles which had 
haunted the rivers and lower plains began to yield to their 
force, and their carcasses, floating out to sea, sank amid the 
slowly subsiding lime and clay, now known as the Lias. 
The volcanoes too were still very active ; and the lighter 
shells, anmionites, and the like, which had been previously 
bobbing up and down on the boiling surface, now sank by 
myriads; for the viscid argillaceous mud thrown up by 
the fiery ebullitions from beneath stuck fast to them, and 
dragged them down. Then came the formation of the 
Oolite, rolled into little egg-like pellets by the waves ; and 
last of all, the Green sand and Chalk ; after which the 
waters ran off, and sank into the deep hollow which now 
forms the bed of the ocean, but which previous to the 
cataclysm had been the place of the land. The dean, as 
he went on, fell into some little confusion regarding the 
true place of some of his animals, such as the megatherium, 
which arrived in his arrangement a Httle too soon. He 
spoke, too — if a newspaper report is to be credited — of a 
heavy creature soon overtaken and drowned by the rising 
waters, w^hich he termed the pterogactylus^ and which does 
not seem to have turned up, either in the body or out of it, 
since it was lost on that memorable occasion. Nor did he 
make any prq^sion in his arrangement for the formation 
of the various Tertiary deposits. But then all these are 
slight matters, that could be very easily woven into his 
hypothesis. As the flood rose along the hill sides, first 
such of the weightier animals would perish as could not 
readily climb steep acclivities; and then the oxen, the 



THE ANTI-GEOLOGISTS. 405 

torses, the deer, and the goats, "with the lighter carnivora, 
svho, as they would die last, — some of them not until the 
'anal disappearance of the hill-tops, — would of course be 
entombed in the upper deposits. Such is the hypothesis 
of the Dean of York, — a hypothesis of which it may be 
justly affirmed, that it is well nigh as ingenious as the 
circumstances of the case permit, and against which little 
else can be urged than that it must seem rather cumbrous 
and fanciful to the class who do not know geology, and, on 
the whole, somewhat inadequate to the class who do. 

The Flood, however, is not left to do the whole geologic 
work, by even such of the anti-geologists as assign to it tho 
largest share. A great unrecorded convulsion which ac- 
companied the Fall is held by some of their number to have 
greatly assisted, by laying down the older formations of the 
fossiliferous rocks; and very much is said to have been 
done during the extended antediluvian period that suc- 
ceeded it. One of perhaps the most amusing though least 
known of the ^vi-iters that take this special view is a Scotch- 
man, resident in a secluded provincial town, who for the last 
twelve or fifteen years has been printing ingenious little 
books against the infidel geologists, and getting letters of 
similar character inserted in such of our country newspapers 
as are ambitious of rendering their science equal to their 
literature. And from the great trouble which he has taken 
with the writings of the individual who now addresses you, 
he seems to regard them as peculiarly unsolid and danger- 
ous. According to this profound cosmogonist, the world 
before the Fall was rather more than t^vicQ its present size, 
and very artificially constructed.* It was a hollow ball, 

* See " Primary and Present State of the Sclar System, particularly of 
our own Planet;" and "Exposure of the Principles of Modern Geology." 
By P. M'Farlane, Author of the "Primary and Present State of the Solar 
System." Edinburgh : Thomas Grant. 



406 THE GEOLOGY OF 

supported inside by a framework of metal wrought into 
hexagonal reticulations, somewhat like the framework of 
the great iron bridge over the river Wear at Sunderland ; 
and which had an open space in its centre, occupied by a 
vast tubular furnace lying direct south and north, which 
threw out huge volumes of flame towards the poles. Over 
the reticulated framework there rose a great, thick firma' 
ment of metal, which formed the inner shell of the globe ; 
over the metal there lay a considerably thicker shell of 
granite ; and over the granite, a thinner shell of a substance 
not specified, perhaps not known, but which, from its being 
completely water-tight, served the purpose of the layer of 
asphalt or terra cotta which the architect spreads over his 
flat roofs, or on the tops of his sloping terraces, afterwards 
to be covered with soil and laid out into gardens. Such, it 
seems, was that portion of the framework of our great globe 
which corresponded to the hollow lath and plaster frame- 
work of the little globes used in schools ; while its upper- 
most layer, — correspondent with the slips of the map 
which the geographer pastes on the model and then var- 
nishes, — was formed of earth and water, economically laid 
out into "most useful and tasteful configurations," — the 
earth into pretty little rising grounds and valleys, and the 
water into seas and lakes of no great extent, but which 
formed, from their very handsome combinations, " a terra- 
queous surface all over peefectly paeadisaical." Over 
this exquisitely neat earth there lay an enveloping atmos- 
phere, greatly thinner and less dense than the air at present 
is, and incapable, in consequence, of being agitated by 
storms ; while directly over the northern and southern ex- 
tremities of the world the polar auroras, now so fitful and 
broken, extended in a permanent arch, and gave light, 
during the long dark winters, to the regions lying below. 
And as warmth was as necessary to the paradisaical perfec- 



TIIlE ANTI-GEOLOGISTS. 407 

tion of these districts as light, they received the necessary- 
heat from the great double-acting furnace in the interior, 
which, belching out flames at both ends, acted powerfully 
against the polar portions of the metallic crust or shell, and 
thus maintained the necessary glow in the absence of the 
sun, on the principle on which a frying-pan or Scotch girdle 
is heated when placed by the cookmaid over the fii-e. And 
such, according to this excellent world-fashioner and very 
zealous man, was the construction of that unblighted and 
unbroken earth which was of old pronounced to be " very 
good." The Fall, however, produced a most remarkable 
and singularly disastrous change. The earth was somehow 
partially crushed and broken, contemporaneously with the 
event, — like a strong fishing basket when it accidentally 
falls from a coach-top under the wheel ; and, from a most 
interesting colored copperplate that illustrates one of the 
author's treatises (for he draws as well as he writes), the 
exact damage which it received can be minutely estimated. 
The interior network was compressed into all sorts of 
irregular polygons; the iron firmament was broken into 
great fragments, — some of which may be seen in the print 
hanging down into the hollow interior, like patches of 
broken plaster dangling from a ceiling, suspended by the 
hairs originally employed to give the necessary tenacity to 
the lime. The great granitic shell was also broken, but 
broken so nicely, on the principle of the arch, that the pieces 
remained in nearly their original places. Finally, vast rents 
are seen to occur in the cement and soil of the outer crust ; 
and these great rents, which must have formed enormous 
gulfs and deep interminable ravines, were destined, it would 
seem, to perform a most important part in the future 
geology of the globe. Forming impassable lines of demar- 
cation between the several portions into which they broke 
up the earth's surface, they imprisoned the recently created 



408 THE GEOLOGY OF 

animals in separate groups, kept as completely from mixing 
together as the fallow-deer of one loftily-walled park are 
kept from mixing with the white oxen of another loftily- 
walled park, or as the kangaroos or duck-billed quadrupeds 
of Australia are kept by the surrounding ocean from mixing 
with the tigers of Sumatra or the tortoises of Madagascar. 
I employ the writer's own happy illustration : — "In some 
places these fragments" of the earth's crust "would be 
piled more or less above each other, and in others quite de- 
tached and isolated, like fragments of ice on the bank of a 
river after a thaw." They would of course be on very dif- 
ferent levels, each having, as I have said, a distinct group 
of animals of its own ; and when, after the lapse of nearly 
two thousand years, the great catastrophe of the Flood 
came on, it would necessarily find, as it rose along the 
levels, and submerged platform after platform in succession, 
a different and yet different set of creatures to kill. To 
borrow from the description of this ingenious cosmogonist, 
" those on the lower fragments would be first engulphed, 
and their races completely extinguished from off the sur- 
face, and deposited in the earth ; then those on higher and 
higher upwards, till the whole became submerged. And 
we have only to suppose that man, with the present sur- 
vivors, were those that occupied one of the higher table- 
lands when the Flood commenced (and of course in that 
case Noah could collect into the ark only out of those of his 
own country) ; then the result would be, that man and his 
present contemporaries would be among the last over- 
whelmed. This will sufiiciently account for the fact of his 
and their remains not being found deep in the earth. 

The two most interesting geological facts therefore, 
namely, that distinct organisms are to be found in distinct 
formations respectively ; and secondly, that no remains of 
man, and few or none of the other races at present surviv- 



THE ANTI-GEOLOGISTS. 409 

ing^ are to he found in any hut comparatively recent form- 
ations^ — these two grand facts of geology, we say, instead 
of pointing back to vast cycles of ages before the creation, 
seem to point merely to the peculiar physical circumstances 
of the fallen planet in the interval between those two event- 
ful stages in its history, the Fall and Flood, and the natural 
consequences of these circumstances in causing distinct 
divisions, and some of these of different elevations, among 
the organic living creatures, during the interval." One 
other circumstance completes this really original and beauti- 
ful hypothesis. The cosmogonist holds that the Flood, — 
no mere tranquil rising of the waters, as some suppose, — 
was accompanied by terrible convulsions, which reduced to 
utter ruui the already shattered earth. The granitic dome 
fell inwards upon the central furnace ; and the fires, burst- 
ing outwards under the enormous pressure, found vent at 
the surface, and made the volcanoes. And this collapsed 
and diminished world, — scarce half the bulk of the old one, 

— with no heating furnace under its polar regions, nor 
aught save the merest tatters of an aurora flitting occasion- 
ally over them, — greatly too dense in itself, and sur- 
rounded by a greatly too dense atmosphere, — with its 
huge mountains, vast oceans, wide steppes, and arid deserts, 
with its snows, its frosts, its drenching rains, its horrible 
tempests, its terrible thunder storms, and devastating earth- 
quakes, — all alike frightful defects, not in the o. iginal plan, 

— is not only unlike the primeval world, not very good, or, 
unlike the antediluvian world, tolerably good, but not good 
at all. " On taking a bird's-eye view of the geographical 
and hydrographical features or superficies of the globe," 
says this bold writer, "any unprejudiced person must at 
once admit, that in either of these departments there is 
scarce a trace of that beautiful, tasteful, and economical 
design which we have a right to expect fi'om the admitted 

35 



410 THE GEOLOGY OF 

qualities of the great Author, and his avowed object in th« 
structure and report of it when newly finished." It is 
added, however, that "its present object^ as the Siberia — ■ 
the penal settlement — of expatriated rebels, it is in its 
present state well calculated to fulfil." 

It may be worth mentioning, that the writer who sets 
himself after a fashion so peculiar to assert and justify the 
ways of Providence against the geologists resides in one of 
the loveliest districts in Scotland, — a district, however, 
shaggy with rock, and overshadowed by great mountains, 
and occasionally visited by earthquake tremors, and both 
snow and thunder storms, and so, with all its wild beauty 
to other eyes, merely, I must suppose, one of the rougher 
districts of the penal Siberia in his. He is, indeed, par- 
ticularly severe upon mountains ; though not, as he tells us, 
Avholly devoid of a lurking prejudice in their favor. But 
what weak prejudice might palliate or plead for, his better 
judgment condemns. "See," says this judicious writer, 
" vast districts of the globe disfigured by tremendous 
masses of rugged and almost barren mountains. . . What, 
cry some, would you bury as deformities the lofty peak and 
rugged mountain brow, nature's palaces, — generally the 
grandest and most sublinie objects in natural scenery ! We 
cordially assure the reader we are by no means prejudiced 
against these grUtid objects ; for if prejudice we have on the 
subject^ it is rather on the other side. It is therefore the 
force of evidence alone makes us, — reluctantly we admit, 
— give up these to rank among the derangements and 
deformities of nature. She, according to her usual taste 
and economy^ would never be at the expeyise of rearing, and 
that upon ground that might have otherwise been much 
better occupied^ such imwioldy, useless masses of matter, 
merely for the sake of gratifying the taste for grandeur and 
subUmity ui a few of her sons, nor, indeed, for any other 



THE ANTI-GEOLOGISTS. 411 

nse we ever heard ascribed to them. . . According to out 
test, a rich and gently undulatory surface, intersected ^\\^h. 
rivulets and sheets of water, in the places taken up by these 
elevations, would be far better, as combining in the highest 
degree the XLtile ciim dulcet * To such of my audience as 
are familiar with Dr. Thomas Burnet's " Sacred Theory of 
the Earth" (1684), that revolution in the cycle of hypo- 
thesis to which I have referred, and through which the 
visionaries of the later ages return to the dreams which had 
occupied the \dsionaries of an earlier time, must be suffi- 
ciently ajDparent in this passage. For not only does Burnet 
speak after the same manner of hills and mountains, but 
also of an idle, ill-founded prejudice entertained in their 
favor. We find him thus summing up a general survey of 
the mountains of the globe: — "Look upon these great 
ranges : in what confusion do they He ! They have neither 
form nor beauty, nor shape, nor order, no more than the 
clouds in the aii\ Then, how barren, how desolate, how 
naked are they! How they stand neglected by nature! 
Neither the rains can soften them, nor the dews from 
heaven make them fruitfiil. I give this short survey of the 
mountains of the earth to help to remove that 2wejucUce we 
are apt to have^ or that conceit that the present e^rth is 
regularly formed. , , There is nothing in nature," adds 

* One of the more brilliant writers of the present day^, — a native of the 
picturesque village in which this anti-geologist resides, — describes in a 
recent work, with the enthusiasm of the poet, the noble mountains which 
rise around it. I know not, however, whether my admiration of the pas- 
sage was not in some degree dashed by a few comic notions suggestive of 
an " imaginary conversation," in the style of Landor, between this popula^ 
author and his anti-geologic townsman, on the merits of hills in general, 
and in especial on the claims of those which encircle Comrie "as the 
mountains are round about Jerusalem." The two gentlemen would, I sus- 
pect, experience considerable difficulty in laying down, in such a discus- 
sion, their common principles. 



412 THEGEOLOGYOF 

this writer, " more shapeless aud ill-figured than an old rock 
or a mountain." 

I leave it to my audience to determine how far this 
depreciatory view, — whether regarded as that of Dr. 
Burnet or of the modern anti-geologist, — agrees with the 
estimate of the higher minds, or whether it manifests the 
proper respect for the adorable Being who, in his infinite 
wisdom, made our world what it is. Let me next show 
that some of even the abler and more respectable anti- 
geologists exhibit no very profound veneration for the letter 
of Scripture, when, instead of bearing, as they think, 
against the deductions of their opponents, they find it 
directly opposed to fancies of their own. It is held by not 
a few among them, that at the Deluge the sea and land 
changed places. When the waters receded, it was found, 
they allege, that the old land had become ocean, and the 
old ocean had become land ; and as there are certain rivers 
which are described in Scripture as flowing beside Eden, 
^nd which, judging by the names given them, still exist, it 
has become imperative on the assertors of the hypothesis to 
show that the rivers which now drain tracts of what they 
hold was then sea, and that fall into seas which they hold 
were then land, could not by any possibility have formed 
the boundaries of the old Adamic garden. Let us mark 
how Mr. Granville Penn, — certainly one of the most ex- 
tensively informed of his class, — deals with this difficulty.* 
-There are, he argues, certain great corruptions of Scripture. 
■What had been at first written as marginal notes by un- 
inspired men, and were m some cases very erroneous and 
absurd, came in the course of transcription to be transferred, 
wholly by mistake, from the side of the page into the body 
of the text ; and thus, in at least a few places, the Scrip- 

* " Comparative Estimate of the Mineral and Mosaical Geologies." By 
Qranvillc Pcun, Esq. London, 1825. 



THE ANTI-GEOLOGISTS. 413 

tures were vitiated, and now declare, instead of Divine 
truth, what is neither sense nor fact. And on this very- 
general, and certainly most perilous ground, he goes on 
to argue, unsupported by a single ancient manuscript, 
and solely on what he terms internal evidence, that the 
verses in Genesis which conflict with his hypothesis must be 
regarded as mere idle glosses, ignorantly or surreptitiously 
introduced into the text by the ancient Copyists. " In the 
second chapter of Genesis," we find him saying, " there 
airpears an internal critical evidence of an insertion of the 
11th, 12th, 13th, and 14th verses, similar to that of the 4th 
verse of the 5th chapter of St. John, and constituting, in a 
similar manner, 2^ parenthesis intersecting the thread of the 
narrative, and introduced solely for a similar purpose of 
illustration. It does not wear the character of the simple 
narrative in which it aj^pears, but of the surcharge of the 
gloss or note of a later age^ founded upon the fanciful 
traditions then prevailing with respect to the situation of 
the ancient Paradise?'^ This certainly is cutting the knot ; 
and, if erected into a precedent by the geologist, would no 
doubt greatly facilitate the labor of reconciliation. It 
would, however, be perilous work for him. "A wolf," says 
Plutarch, " peeping into a hut where a company of shep- 
herds were assembled, saw them regaling themselves v/ith 
a joint of mutton. 'Ye gods!' he exclaimed, 'what a 
clamor these men would have raised if they had caught 
we at such a banquet.' " I need scarcely add, that the 
hypothesis in whose behalf Scripture is thus divested of its 
authority, and recklessly cast aside, is entirely a worthless 
one ; and that the various continents of the globe, instead 
of all dating from one period little more than four thousand 
years back, are of very various ages, — some of them com- 
paratively modem, though absolutely old in relation to 
human history ; and some of so hoar an antiquity, that the 
35* 



414 THE GEOLOGY OF 

term since man appeared upon earth might be employed 
as a mere unit to measure it by. 

It need not surprise us that a writer who takes such 
strange liberties with a book which he professes to respect, 
and which he must have had many opportunities of know- 
ing, should take still greater liberties with a science for 
which he entertains no respect whatever, and of whose first 
principles he is paipably ignorant. And yet the wild reck- 
lessness of some of his explanations of geological phe- 
nomena must somewhat astonish all sufficiently acquainted 
with the science to know that the place and relations of its 
various formations have been long since determined, and 
now as certainly form the regulating data of the practical 
miner, as the places and relations long since determined by 
the geographer form the regulating data of the practical 
navigator or engineer. It is as certain, for instance, that 
the Oolitic system underlies the Green Sand and the Chalk, 
with all the various formations of the Tertiary division, — 
Eocence, Miocene, Phocene, and Pleistocene, — as that 
York is situated to the south of Edinburgh, or that both 
these cities lie very considerably to the north of London 
and Paris. And the anti-geologist who would argue, in the 
heat of controversy, that the Oolite and the Pleistocene 
were contemporaneous deposits, would be no more worthy 
of reply than the anti-geographer who would assert, in 
order to serve some argumentative purpose, that the North 
Cape lies in the same latitudinal parallel as South California, 
or that Terra del Fuego is but a day's sailing from Iceland. 
And yet such, as I intimated on a former evening, is the 
line taken up by Mr. Granville Penn, in dealing with the 
difficulties of the .Kirkdale Cave, so remarkable for its 
accumulations of gnawed bones of the Pleistocene ages, — 
especially for its bones of hygenas, tigers, bears, wolves, 
xhinoceroseSa and elephants. The cave occurs in the moor- 



THE ANTI-GEOLOGISTS. 415 

lands of Yorkshire, in a limestone rock of that Oolitic 
division to which the Oxford Clay and the Coral Kag 
belong, and contains corals and shells that had passed into 
extinction long even ere the Tertiary period began ; while 
in the cave itself, mixed with bones of the extinct mammals 
of the geologic age in immediate advance of the present 
one, there have been found the contemporary remains of 
animals that still live in our fields and woods, such as the 
hare, the rabbit, the weasel, and the water rat. And we 
find Mr. Penn assigning both the Oolitic rock in which the 
cave is hollowed, and the mammalian remains of the cave 
itself, equally to the period of the deluge. The limestone 
existed at that time, it would seem, as a soft calcareous 
paste, into which the animal remains, floated northwards 
from intertroi:>ical regions on the waters of the Flood, were 
precipitated in vast quantities, and sank, and then, ferment- 
ing under the putrefactive influences, the gas which thoy 
formed blew up the yielding lime and mud around them 
into a long narrow cave, just as a glass-blower blows up a 
bottle, or as a little yeast blows up into similar but greatly 
smaller cavities a bit of leaven. And the stalactites and 
stalagmites which encrust the Kirkdale Cave are, Mr. Penn 
holds, simply the last runnings of the lime that exuded after 
the general mass had begun to set. Certainly any one dis- 
posed to take such liberties with the Bible on the one hand, 
and with geologic science on the other, as those taken in 
the given instances by this most formidable of the anti- 
geologists, could have but little difficulty in making either 
Scripture as geological or geology as Scriptural as he had a 
mind. His chief danger would be that of making the 
sounder theologians just a little angry, and of escaping, 
unless quoted for the joke's sake, the notice of the geolo- 
gists altogether. In truth, the extreme absurdity of 
our later anti-geologists in virtually contending, in the 



416 THE GEOLOGY OF 

controversy, that their ignorance of an interesting science, 
founded on millions of determined facts, ought to be per- 
mitted to wergh against the knowledge of the men who 
have studied it most thoroughly, forms their best defence. 
It secures them against all save neglect. As, however, 
some of their number are well meaning men, who would 
not be ridiculous if they could help it, and only oppose 
themselves to the geologists because they deem them mis- 
chievous and in error, it may be worth while showing them, 
by an example or two, the ludicrous nature of the positions 
which in their honest ignorance they permit themselves to 
occupy, and the real scope and bearing of the arguments 
which they unwittingly permit themselves to use. I shall 
adduce two several instances of reasoning, directed by the 
anti-geologists against their antagonists (as they themselves 
believed), but which, from their ignorance of the true state 
of the argument, and of the bearing of the facts with which 
they dealt, in reality made out for these antagonists as 
strong a case as they could possibly have made out for 
themselves. And I am sure that, rather than be found 
sidmg with their opponents, the anti-geologists would be 
content even to acquire a little geology. 

I shall select my first instance from the records of the 
annual controversy which used to rage some ten or fifteen 
years ago, in sermons, newspapers, and magazines, imme- 
diately after every meeting of the British Association. A 
religious Dublin newspaper, — the "Statesman and Record," 
— since extinct, took always an active part in these discus- 
sions on the anti-geological side, and boldly aflSrmed, as in 
a number now before me, that geology had the devil for its 
author. A learned correspondent of the paper, who was, 
however, somewhat more charitable, thought that at least 
the facts of the science might be exempted from a con- 
demnation so sweeping; nay, that, well interpreted, they 



THE ANTI-GEOLOGISTS 417 

might be found decidedly opposed to at least the more 
mischievous deductions of the geologists ; and in illustrat- 
ing the point, we find him thus arguing, fi-om certain 
appearances in the valley of the Nile, that the globe which 
we inhabit cannot possibly be more than six thousand 
years old.* "The valley of the Nile," says this writer, "is 
known to be covered with a bed of slime which the river 
has deposited in its periodical inundations, and which rests 
on a foundation of sand, like that of the adjacent desert. 
The French savans who accompanied Bonaparte in his 
Egyptian expedition made several experiments to ascertain 
the thickness and depth of this suj^eruicumbent bed. They 
dug about two hundred pits, and carefully measured the 
thickness in the transversal section of the valley, where the 
deposit had been free from obstacles, and had not been 
materially increased or lessened by local causes. They 
found the mean of all these measurements to be six and a 
half metres, or rather more than twenty feet. M. Gironde 
endeavored to determine the quantity of slime deposited in 
a century ; and he found that the elevation of soil in that 
period was rather less than four inches and a half! Dividing 
the total thickness of the bed by the centenary elevation, 
he found the quotient 56.50 ; whence it followed that the 
inundations had commenced 5650 years before the year 
1800, when the experiments were made, — a number which 
only differed 159 years from the Mosaic date. The differ- 
ence is not very important, when it is considered that the 
most trifling error, whether in the measure of the entire 
superincumbent bed, or in the valuation of the quantity 
of slime deposited in a century, affects the final results. 
Notwithstanding this, the coincidence between the sacred 
historian and the computations of science is remarkable, 

* " Statesman and Record," October 6th, 1846. 



418 THE GEOLOGY OF 

and furnislies one proof more of the harmony existing 
between nature and revelation. An honest experimentalist 
was ccmstrained to arrive at this conclusion at a period 
when the infidel school of our continental neighbors was in 
high feather. I am sorry to add, that the result of his own 
calculation had not that effect on the philosopher himself, 
or his fi'ee-thinking associates, which, for their own sakes, 
was desirable ; but it is no less valuable to us on that 
account ; for we know that an unwilling witness to the 
truth is worth a score of evidences already prejudiced in 
its favor." 

Now, this is clear, distinct statement ; and nothing can 
be more evident than that the theologian who makes it 
holds he is reasoning with conclusive effect in behalf of 
what may be termed the short chronology, — not in its 
legitimate connection with the recent introduction of the 
human species, but in its supposed bearing on the age of 
the earth. And in doing so he commits himself to the 
apparent positive fact, determined on what may be regarded 
as geologic data, that the river Nile has been flo^^dng over 
its bed for about as many*years as have elapsed, according 
to the Hebrew chronology adopted by Usher, since the 
creation of man, and no more. To the integrity of this 
inference he pledges himself, as an inference to which the 
infidel ought to have yielded, as conclusive in its bearing 
on the question of the earth's age, and as of singular value 
to the believer who sets himself to deal with the evidences 
of his faith. Now, without referring to the circumstance 
that the data on which the French savans under Napoleon 
founded have since been challenged by geologists, such 
as Lieutenant Newbold and Sir G. Wilkinson, who have 
carefully surveyed the rocks' and soils of Egypt with the 
assistance of clearer fight than existed at the commence- 
ment of the century, let us, for the argument's sake, hold 



THE ANTI-GEOLOGISTS. 419 

the inference to be quite as good as this theologian regards 
it. And see, we urge upon him, that you yourself do not 
suffer it to drop should you find that it commits you to tlie 
other side of the argument. Be at least as fiiir and honest 
as you say the infidels ought to have been. The six and a 
half metres of silt and slime, — representative, let us hold, 
of from five to six thousand years, — rest, you say, on " a 
foundation of sand like that of the adjacent desert." But 
have you ascertained on what the sand rests? I know 
nothing of that, replies the theologian ; I had not even 
thought of that. But the geologist has thought of it, we 
reply; and has spent much time under the hot sun in 
ascertaining the point. For nearly three hundred miles, — 
from the inner boundaries of the delta to within a few 
hours' journey of the cataracts, — the silt and sand rest on 
what is knoTVTi as the "marine" or nummulitic limestone, 
— a formation of great extent, for it runs into the Nubian 
desert on the one hand, and into the Libyan desert on the 
other ; and which, though it abounds in the animalcules of 
the European chalk, is held to belong, in at least its upper 
beds, which are charged with nummulites, to the earlier 
Eocene. Over this marine limestone there rests a newer 
formation, of later Tertiary age, which contains the casts 
of sea shells, and whole forests of dicotyledonous trees, 
converted into a flint-like chert ; and over all repose the 
sands and gravels of the desert. Underneath the silt of 
the river, then, and the sand of the desert, lie these two 
formations of the Tertiary division. The lower, which is 
of great thickness, must have been of slow formation. It 
is composed almost exclusively, in many parts, of micro- 
scopic animals, and aboimds in others in fossil shells, — 
nautili, ostreadie, turritella, and nummulites, with corals, 
sponges, the remains of Crustacea, and the teeth of fishes. 
And between the period of its deposition and that of the 



420 THE GEOLOGY OF 

formation which rests upon it the surface of what is now 
Egypt must have been elevated over the surface of the sea, 
to be covered, in the course of ages, by great forests, 
which, ere the land assumed its present form and level, 
were submerged by another oscillation of the surface, and 
petrified amid beds of a siliceous sand at the bottom of 
the ocean. Nor is the underlying marine limestone by any 
means the oldest of the sedimentary rocks of Egypt. It 
rests on a sandstone of Permian or Triassic age; the sand- 
stone rests, in turn, on the famous Breccia de Verde of 
Egypt ; and the Breccia on a group of Azoic rocks, gneisses, 
quartzes, mica schists, and clay slates, that wrap round the 
granitic nucleus of Syene. The formations of Egypt con- 
stitute a well-determined part of that great series of systems 
which compose the upper portion of the earth's crust : its 
silt is by far the most inconsiderable of its deposits ; and 
if five thousand six hundred and fifty years were exhausted 
in laying down layer after layer of the twenty feet which 
form its average thickness, what enormous periods must 
we not demand in addition for the laying down of the 
forest formation, of the marine limestone formation, of the 
Kew Red Sandstone formation, of the Breccia de Verde 
formation, and, in short, for the some ten miles of fossilifer- 
ous rock of which these deposits form such definite, well- 
determined portions; besides the time necessary for the 
production of the enormously developed Azoic rocks which 
lie mider all ! The theologian, in this instance, instead of 
reasoning, as he himself supposed, in behalf of the short 
chronology, has been making out a very formidable case 
for the long one; and all that the geologist can have 
to urge upon him in the circumstances is simply that he 
should act as he holds the infidel ought to have done, 
and yield to the force of evidence. I may mention in 
the passing, tliat some of the most ancient buildings of 



THE AKTI-GEOLOGISTS. 



421 



Eg}^t are formed of the Tertiary marine limestones of the 
country; the stones of the pyramids are charged with 
nummulites, known to the Arabs as "Pharaoh's beans j" 

Fig. U6. 




NUM3IULITES L^VIGATA. 

(Pharaoh's Beans.) 



and these organisms stand out in high relief on the 
weathered portions of the Great Sphinx. Some of the 
oldest things in the world in their relation to human his- 
tory, — erections, many of which had survived the memory 
of their founders even in the days of Herodotus, — are 
formed of materials so modern in their relation to the 
geologic epochs, that they had no existence as rock until 
after the Palaeozoic and Secondary ages had gone by. !N"ot 
only the Carboniferous sandstone of the High Church and 
Parliament House of Edinburgh, but even the Oolitic (that 
is, Portland stone) of Somerset House and St. Paul's, are 
of an antiquity incalculably A^ast compared with the stone 
out of which the oldest of the pyramids were fashioned. 

The second example which I shall adduce is one with 
which many of my auditors must be already familiar. The 
Falls of Niagara are gradually eating their way through an 
elevated tract of table-land, upwards towards Lake Erie, at 
the rate of about fifty yards in forty years ; and it has been 
argued by Sir Charles Lyell, that as they are now seven 
miles distant from Queenston, where the elevation of the 
3G 



422 THE GEOLOGY OF 

plateaux begins, they must have taken about ten thousand 
years to scoop out their present deep channel through that 
space.* Ten thousand years ago the Falls were, he infers, 
at Queenston ; and the grounds on which he reasons are 
exactly those on which one would infer that a laborer who 
had cut a ditch two hundred yards long at the rate of ten 
yards per day, and was still at work without pause or inter- 
mission, had begun to cut it just twenty days previous. A 
reverend anti-geologist takes up Sir Charles ; f and, after 
denouncing the calculation as "a stab at the Christian 
religion," seeing it involves the assertion that the "Falls 
were actually at Queenston four thousand years before the 
creation of the world according to Moses," he brings certain 
facts, adduced both by other writers and Sir Charles him- 

* Sir Charles Lyell's statement is by no means so express or definite as 
it is represented to be in this passage, in which I have taken the evidence 
of his opponents regarding it. What he really says (see his "Principles," 
second edition, 1832) is what follows: — "If the ratio of recession had 
never exceeded fifty yards in forty years, it must have required nearly ten 
thousand years for the excavation of the whole ravine ; but no probable 
conjecture can be offered as to the quantity of time consumed in such an 
operation, because the retrograde movement may have been much more 
rapid when the whole current was confined within a space not exceeding 
a fourth or fifth of that which the Falls now occupy." In the eighth 
edition of the same work, however, published in 1850, after he had ex- 
amined the Falls, there occurs the following re-statement of the case : — 
" After the most careful inquiries I was able to make during my visit to 
the spot in 1841-42, I came to the conclusion that the average [recession] 
of one foot a year would be a much more probable conjecture than that 
of one and a quarter yards. In that case it would have required thirty- 
five thousand pears for the retreat of the Falls from the escarpment of 
Queenston to their present site. It seems by no means improbable that 
such a result would be no exaggeration of the truth, although we cannot 
assume that the retrograde movement has been uniform. At some points 
it may have receded much faster than at present; but in general its prog- 
ress was probably slower, because the cataract, when it began to recede, 
must have been nearly twice its present height." 

t " Scottish Christian Herald," 1838, vol. iii., p. 7G6. 



THE ANTI-GEOLOGISTS. 423 

self, to bear on the calculation, such as the fact that the 
deep trench through which the Niagara runs is much nar- 
rower in its lower than in its upper reaches, and that the 
river must have performed its work of excavation, when the 
breadth was less, at a greatly quicker rate than now. And 
thus the work of excavating the trench is brought fairly 
within six thousand years. 'Nor is the principle of the 
reasoning bad. In our illustration of the ditch excavated 
by the laborer we of course take it for granted that it is a 
ditch of the same depth and breadth throughout, and ex- 
cavated in the same sort of soil ; for if greatly narrower and 
shallower at one place than at another, or dug in a greatly 
softer mould, the rate of its excavation at diiferent times 
might be very different indeed, and the general calculation 
widely erroneous, if based on the ratio of progress when it 
went on most slowly, taken as an average ratio for the 
■VA'hole. But the anti-geologist provokes only a smile when, 
in his triumph, he exultingly exclaims, " It is on grounds 
such as these that the most learned and voluminous among 
English geologists disputes the Mosaic history of the Cre- 
ation and Deluge, — a strong proof that even men of argu- 
ment on other subjects often reason in the most childish and 
ridiculous manner, and on grounds totally false, when they 
undertake to deny the truth of the Holy Scriptures." 
Now, it must be wholly unnecessary to remark here, that it 
is surely one thing to "undertake to deny the truth of the. 
Holy Scriptures," and quite another and different thing to 
hold that the Niagara Falls may have been at Queenston 
ten thousand years ago ; or further, that it seems not in the 
least wise to stake the truth of Revelation on any such 
issue. Let me request you, however, to observe, that in 
one important respect this writer resembles the former one. 
The former, ignorant of the various phenomena exhibited 
by the great deposits of Egypt, exhausted all his five 



424 THE GEOLOGY OF 

thousand six hundred years of available time in accounting 
for the formation of one of the least of them, — the silt of 
the Nile ; and the latter, though he bids down Sir Charles 
some four thousand four hundred years or so in the one 
item of scooping out the bed of the St. Lawrence, at least 
expends the remainder of the ten thousand, — his five 
thousand six hundred years, — in that work of excavation 
alone, and leaves himself no further sums to set off against 
the various geologic processes that may have preceded it. 

In this case, as in the other, let us grant, for the argu- 
ment's sake, all the facts. Let us admit that the trench 
through which the St. Lawrence now flows has been cut by 
the river in somewhat less than six thousand years. But 
through Avhat, let us ask, has it been cut ? There can exist 
no doubt on the subject : it has been cut through an ancient 
graveyard of the Upper Silurian system, charged with the 
peculiar fossils characteristic of what are known as the 
Clinton and Niagara groups, and common, many of them, 
to the Upper Silurian of our own coimtry and of the 
European continent. Leptoena depressa and Pentamerus 
oblongus, two of the most frequent shells of the deposit, 
occur also in equal abundance in the Dudley and Caradoc 
formations of England; its prevailing encrinite, Ichthyo- 
crimis Icevis, is scarce distinguishable from an encrinite 
which I have often picked up in the quarries of the 
"Wren's Nest" {Ichthyocrinus pyriformis) ; while its 
prevailing trilobite, Phacops Ihnulunis^ seems to be but a 
transatlantic variety of our well known Ascq^hus (Phacops) 
caitdatus. Further, the sequence of the various formations 
both above and below the Niagara group, is shown with 
remarkable distinctness in that part of the world along the 
shores of the great lakes. They may be traced downward, 
on the one hand, along the Lower Silurian deposits, to the 
nou-fossiliferous base on which the system rests, and 



THE ANTI-GEOLOGISTS 42* 

upwards, on the other, through the Old Red Sandstone 
and the Carboniferous Limestone, to the workable Coal 
Measures. Both stratigraphically and palaeontologically 
the place in the scale of the Niagara graveyard can be 
definitely determined; and a superficial deposit on the 
lieights in its immediate neighborhood shows that the river 
did not begin its work of excavation among its long extinct 
shells, trilobites, and corals, until after not only the great 
Palaeozoic, but also the Secondary and Tertiary divisions 
had been laid down, and the recent period ushered in. The 
superficial shells of the adjacent heights belong to the 
Pleistocene age, and show that in even that comparatively 
modern time the lower lands of Upper Canada were sub- 
merged beneath the level of the ocean, and that a series of 
deep seas, connected by broad sounds, occupied the place 
of the great lakes. Not until the last uj^heaval of the land 
was the river now known as the St. Lawrence called into 
existence, to begin its work of excavation ; and ere that 
event took place, fully ten miles of fossiliferous rock had 
been deposited on the earth's surface, charged with the 
remams of many succeeding creations. The deposit through 
which the St, Lawrence is slowly mining its way is older 
than the river itself by the vast breadth of the four Tertiary 
periods, by that of all the Secondary ages, — Cretaceous, 
Oolitic, and Triassic, — by the periods, too, of the Permian 
system, of the Carboniferous system, of the Old Red sys- 
tem, and of the uppermost beds of the Upper Silurian 
system. But a simple illustration may better serve to show 
the true character of the conclusion urged here by the 
opponent of Sir Charles, than any such line of statement as 
that which I employ, however clear to the geologist. In 
the year 1817, Prince's Street, in Edinburgh, was opened 
up to the Calton Hill, and the Calton burying-ground cut 
through to the depth of many feet by the roadway. Let us 
36 



426 THE GEOLOGY OF 

suppose that when the excavation has been carried a 
hundred yards into the cemetery, a geologist, finding the 
laborers cutting on the average about a yard per day, 
simply intimates as his opinion that the laborers have been 
a hundred days at work. " l^o," replies a controversiahst 
on the anti-geological side; "for the first fifty yards, so 
soft was the subsoil, and so shallow the covering of mould, 
that the laborers must have cut at the rate of two yards a 
day ; it has been merely for the last fifty yards that they 
have been excavating at the present slow rate : they cannot 
have been more than seventy-five days at work. I marvel 
exceedingly at the absurdity of geological reasoners : pal- 
pably the hurying-ground of the Calton is only seventy-five 
days old.''^ Now, such, in no exaggerated, but, on the con- 
trary, greatly modified form, is the argument that would 
limit the age of the earth to the period during which the 
St. Lawrence has been scooping out a channel for itself, 
from Queenston to Niagara, through an ancient Silurian 
burying-ground. Both arguments alike confound the age 
of the ancient burying-grounds with the date of the modern 
excavations opened up through them ; but in order to 
render the argument of my illustration equally absurd with 
the other, it would be not only necessary to infer that the 
Calton cemetery was only seventy-five days old, but also that 
the rock on which it rested was no older. 

But enough of follies such as these ! I had marked a 
good many other passages of similar character in the writ- 
ings of the recent anti-geologists, and would have little 
difficulty in filling a volume with such ; but it would be a 
useless, though mayhap curious work, and is much better 
exhibited by specimen than as a whole. A little folly is 
amusing, but much of it fatigues. There is a time coming, 
and now not very distant, when the vagaries of the anti- 
geologists will be as obsolete as those of the geographers of 



THE AN-TI-GEOLOGISTS. 427 

Salamanca, or as those of the astronomers who upheld the 
orthodoxy of Ptolemy agamst Galileo and Newton ; and 
when they will be regarded as a sort of curious fossils, very 
monstrous and bizarre, and altogether of an extinct type, but 
which had once not only life, but were formidable. It will 
then be seen by all what a noble vestibule the old geologic 
ages form to that human period in which moral responsi- 
bility first began upon earth, and a creature destined to 
immortality anticipated an eternal hereafter. There is 
always much of the mean and the little in the worlds which 
man creates for himself, and in the history which he gives 
them. Of all the abortions of the middle ages which have 
come down to us, I know not a more miserable one, — at 
once ludicrous and sad, — than that heavens and earth of 
Cosmas Indicopleustes^ the monk, which I illustrated by 
diagrams in my last lecture (Figs. 114, 115). They are just 
such heavens and earth as a monk might have made, and 
made too at a sitting. The heavens, represented as a solid 
arch raised on tall walls, .resemble, as a whole, the arch 
which figures in the middle of a freemason's apron, or, more 
homely still, the section of a wine cellar ; while the earth 
lies beneath as a great plain or floor, with a huge hill in the 
distance, behind which the sun passes when it is night. 
And yet this scheme gave law to the world for more than 
six centuries, and lay like a nightmare on physical dis- 
covery, astronomic and geographical. The anti-geologists 
have been less mischievous, for they live in a more enlight- 
ened age ; and we already see but the straggling remains 
of the body, and know that the time cannot be far distant 
when it will be as completely extinct as any of the old 
faunas. The great globe, ever revolving on itself, and 
journeying in space round the sun, in obedience to laws 
which it immortalized a Newton to discover and demon- 
strate, is an infinitely more sublime and noble object than 



428 THE GEOLOGY OF ANTI-GEOLOGISTS. 

the earth of Cosmas the monk, with its conical mountain 
and its crypt-like firmament ; nor can I doubt that its history 
throughout the long geologic ages, — its strange story of 
successive creations, each placed in advance of that which 
had gone before, and its succeeding organisms, vegetable 
and animal, ranged according to their appearance in time, 
on principles which our profounder students of natural 
science have but of late determined, — will be found in an 
equal degree more worthy of its Divine Author than that 
which would huddle the whole into a few literal days, and 
convert the incalculably ancient universe which we inhabit 
into a hastily run-up erection of yesterday. 



LECTURE ELEVENTH. 

ON THE LESS KNOWN FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND.* 
PART I. 

Scotland has its four fossil floras, — its flora of the Old 
Red Sandstone, its Carboniferous flora, its Oolitic flora, 
and that flora of apparently Tertiary age of which his 
Grace the Duke of Argyll found so interesting a fragment 
overflown by the thick basalt beds and trap tufis of MuU. 
Of these, the only one adequately known to the geologist 
is the gorgeous flora of the Coal Measures, — probably the 
richest, in at least individual plants, which the world has 
yet seen. The others are all but wholly unknown; and 
the Association may be the more disposed to tolerate the 
comparative meagreness of the few brief remarks which I 
purpose making on two of their number, — the floras of 
the Old Red Sandstone and the Oolite, — from the consid- 
eration that that meagreness is only too truly representative 
of the present state of our knowledge regarding them ; and 
that if my descriptions be scanty and inadequate, it is only 
because the facts are still few. How much of the lost may 

* The substance of this and the following lecture was originally given 
in a single paper, before the Geological Section of the British Association, 
held at Glasgow in September 1855. So considerable have been the ad- 
ditions, however, that the one paper has swelled into two lectures. Most 
of the added matter was at first thrown into the form of Notes; but it was 
found, that from their length and frequency, they would have embarrassed 
the printer, mayhap the reader also ; and so most of the larger ones have 
been introduced into the text within brackets. 



430 ON THE LESS KNOWN 

yet be recovered I know not ; but the circumstance that 
two great floras, — remote predecessors of the existing 
one, — which once covered with their continuous mantle 
of green the dry land of what is now Scotland, should be 
represented by but a few coniferous fossils, a few cycadace- 
ous fronds, a few ferns and club mosses, must serve to 
show what mere fragments of the past history of our 
country we have yet been able to recover from the rocks, 
and how very much in the work of exploration and dis- 
covery still remains for us to do. We stand on the further 
edge of the great floras of by-past creations, and have 
gathered but a few handful s of faded leaves, a few broken 
branches, a few decayed cones. 

The Silurian deposits of our country have not yet fur- 
nished us with any unequivocal traces of a terrestrial 
vegetation. Professor Nicol of Aberdeen, on subjecting 
to the microscope the ashes of a Silurian anthracite which 
occurs in Peeblesshire, detected in it minute tubular fibres, 
which seem, he says, to indicate a higher class of vegetation 
than the algas ; but these may have belonged to a marine 
vegetation notwithstanding. I detected some years ago, 
in the Trilobite-bearing schists of Girvan, associated vrith 
graptolites of the Lower Silurian type, a vegetable organism 
somewhat resembling the leaf of one of the pond weeds, — 
Jin order of plants, some of whose species, such as Zostera, 
find their proper habitats in salt water. I have placed 
beside this specimen a fragment of the same graptolite- 
bearing rock, across which I have pasted part of a leaf of 
Zostera marina, the only plant of our Scottish seas which 
is furnished with true roots, bears real flowers inclosed in 
herbaceous spathes, and produces a well formed farinaceous 
seed. It will be seen, that in the few points of comparison 
wliich can be instituted between forms so exceedingly sim- 
ple, the ancient very closely resembles the recent organism. 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 



431 



It is not impossible, therefore, that the Silurian vegetable 
may have belonged to some tribe of plants allied to Zostura^ 



Fig. U7. 




a, SILTJEIAN ORGANISM. h, GRAPTOLITE. C, PORTION OP THE 
LEAF OF ZOSTERA MARINA. 



and if so, we can easily conceive how the Silurian anthracite 
of our country may be altogether of marine origin, and 
may yet exhibit in its microscopic tubular fibres vestiges 
of a vegetation higher than the algae. 

[It were well, in dealing with the very ancient floras, in 
which equivocal forms occur that might have belonged to 
either the land or the sea, to keep in view those curious 
plants of the present time, the habitats of which are de- 
cidedly marine, but which are marked by many of the 
peculiarities of the seed-bearing plants of the land. The 
superiority of Zostera to the common sea weeds of our 
coasts appears to have struck in the north of Scotland eyes 
very little practised in such matters, and seems to have 
given rise, in consequence, to a popular myth. Zostera 
marina abounds on a series of sand banks, partially 



432 ON THE LESS KNOWN 

uncovered by the larger stream tides, which lie directly 
opposite the town of Cromarty, near the spot pointed out 
by tradition as the site of an earlier town, which was 
swept away some two or three hundred years ago by the 
encroachments of the sea. And these banks, with their 
thick covering of green Zostera, used to be pointed out by 
the fishermen of the place, in my younger days, as the 
meadows of the old town, still bearing their original cover- 
ings of vegetation, — a vegetation altered no doubt by the 
"sea change" that had come over it, but still essentially 
the same, it was said, as that which had smiled around the 
old burgh, and not at all akin to the brown kelp or tangle 
that every storm from the boisterous north-east heaps along 
the shore. It was virtually affirmed that the luxuriant ter- 
restrial grasses of ancient Cromarty had made a virtue of 
necessity in their altered circumstances ; and that, settling 
down into grasses of the sea, they remained to testify that 
an ancient Cromarty there had once been, Zostera marina^ 
like most plants of the land, rij^ens its seeds towards the 
close of autumn ; and I have seen a smart night's fi*ost at 
this season, when coincident with a stream tide that laid 
bare the beds, nip its seed-bearing stems by thousands; 
and have found them strewed along the beach a few days 
after, with all their grass-like spikes fully developed, and 
their grain-like seeds charged with a farinaceous substance, 
which one would scarce expect to find developed in the 
^ea. In the higher reaches of the Cromarty Frith, the 
Zostera beds, which are of great extent, are much fre- 
4uented, during the more protracted frosts of a severe 
winter, by wild geese and swans, that dig up and ^Qed. 
upon the saccharine roots of the plant. The Zostera of 
the warmer latitudes attain to a larger size than those 
of our Scottish seas. " A southern species," says Loudon, 
^^ Zostera oceanica, has leaves a foot long and an inch 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 



433 



broad. It is used as a thatch, which is said to last a 
century ; bleaches white wdth exposure ; and furnishes the 
rush-like material from which the envelops of Italian liquor 
flasks are prepared." The simple rectilinear venation of 
ribbon-like fronds, usually much broken, that occurs in the 
Lower Old Red Sandstone, has often reminded me of that 
exhibited by this exotic species of Zostera.] 

Associated with the earliest ichthyic remains of the Old 
Red Sandstone, we find vegetable organisms in such abun- 

Fig 118. 




rucoiD. 



dance, that they communicate often a fissile character to 
the stone in which they occur. But, existing as mere 
carbonaceous markings, their state of keeping is usually 
so bad, that they tell us little else than that the antiquely- 
37 



434 ON THE LESS KNOWN 

formed fishes of this remote period swam over sea bottoms 
darkened by forests of algae. The prevailmg plant was one 
furnished with a long, smooth stem, which, though it threw 
off, in the alternate order, numerous branches at least half 
as stout as itself, preserved its thickness for considerable 
distances without diminution, — a common fucoidal charac- 
teristic. We find its remains mixed in the rock, though 
sparingly, with those of a rough-edged plant, knobbed some- 
what like the thong-like receptacles of Himanihalia lorea^ 
which also threw off branches like the other, but diminished 
more rapidly. A greatly more minute vegetable organism 
of the same beds, characterized by its bifid partings, which 
strike off at angles of about sixty, somewhat resembles the 
small-fronded variety of Dictyota dichotoma^ save that the 
slim terminations of the frond are usually bent into little 
hooks, like the tendrils of the pea just as their points begin 
to turn. Another rather rare plant of the period, existing 
as a broad, irregularly cleft frond, somewhat resembling 

Fig. 119. 



%c 



FUCOIDS. 




that of a modern Cutleria or Nitophyllum^ betrays at once, 
in its outline and general appearance, its marine origin ; as 
does also an equally rare contemporary, which, judging 
from its appearance, seems to have been a true fucus. It 
exists in the rock as if simply drawn ui Indian ink ; for it 
exhibits no structure, though, as in some of the ferns of the 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 435 

Coal Measures, what were once the curls of its leaflets 
continue to exist as sensible hollows on the surface. It 
broadens and divides atop into three or four lobes, and 
these, in turn, broaden and divide into minor lobes, double 
or ternate, and usually rounded at their terminations. In 
general appearance the plant not a little resembles those 
specimens of Fiicus vesiculosus which we find existing in a 
diminutive form, and divested of both the receptacles and 
the air vessels, at the mouth of rivers. Of two other kinds 
of plants I have seen only confused masses, m which the 
individuals were so crowded together, and withal so frag- 
mentary and broken, that their separate forms could not 
be traced. In the one the general appearance was such 
as might be produced by compressed and tangled masses 
of Chorda jiUum^ in which the linear and even tubular 
character of the plant could be determined, but not its 
continuous, cord-Uke aspect; in the other, the fi-agments 
seemed well nigh as slim as hairs, and the appearance was 
such as might be produced by branches of that common 
ectocarpus, E. littoralis^ which may be seen on our rocky 
coasts roughening at low water the stems of lamuiaria. 
When highly magnified, a mesial groove might be de- 
tected running along each of the hair-like lines. With 
these marine plants we occasionally find large rectilinear 
stems, resolved into a true coal, but retaining no organic 
character by which to distinguish them. As I have seen 
some of these more than three inches in diameter, and, 
though existing as mere fragments, several feet in length, 
they must, if they were also plants of the sea, have ex- 
ceeded in size our largest laminaria.* And such are the 

* A curious set of these, -with specimens of the smooth-stemmed fucoid 
collected by Mr. John Miller of Thurso, — a meritorious laborer in the 
geologic field, — were exhibited at Glasgow to the Association. The larger 
stems were thickly traversed in Mr. J. Miller's specimens by diagonal 



436 ON THE LESS KNOWN 

few vegetable organisms, of apparently aquatic origin, wliich 
I have hitherto succeeded in detecting in the Lower Old 
Red Sandstone of Scotland.* Their individual numbers, 
however, must have been very great, though, from the 
destructible character of their tissues, their forms have 
perished in the stone. The immensely developed flagstones 
of Caithness seem to owe their dark color to organic matter 
mainly of vegetable origin. So strongly bituminous, indeed, 
are some of the beds of dingier tint, that they flame in the 
fire like slat^ steeped in oil. 

The remains of a terrestrial vegetation in this deposit are 
greatly scantier than those of its marine plants ; but they 
must be regarded as possessing a peculiar interest, as, with 
the exception of the spore cases of the Ludlow rocks, the 
oldest of their class, in at least the British islands, whose 
true place in the scale can be satisfactorily estabhshed. Li 
the flagstones of Orkney there occurs, though very rarely, 
a minute vegetable organism, which I have elsewhere de- 
scribed as having much the appearance of one of our 

lines, Avhich seemed, however, to be merely lines of rhomboidal fracture 
in the glassy coal into which the plants were converted, and not one of 
their original characters. 

* I must, however, add, that there was found in the neighborhood 
of Stromness about fifteen years ago, by Dr. John Fleming, a curious 
nondescript vegetable organism, which, though equivocal in character 
and appearance, was in all probability a plant of the sea. It consisted of 
a flattened cylinder, in some of the specimens exceeding a foot in length 
by an inch in breadth, and traversed on both the upper and under sides 
by a mesial groove extending to the extremities. It bore no external 
markings, and the section exhibited but an indistinct fibrous structure, 
sufficient, however, to indicate its vegetable origin. I have not hitherto 
succeeded in finding for myself specimens of this organism, which has 
been named provisionally, by Dr. Fleming, Stroma ohsciaxi ; but it seems 
not improbable that certain supposed fragments of wood, detected by Mr. 
Charles Peach in the Caithness Flagstones, but which do not exhibit the 
woody structure, may have belonged to it. 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 



437 



Fig. 120. smaller ferns, such as the maidenhair- 

spleenwort, or dwarf moonwort. It 
consists of a minute stem, partially 
covered by what seems to be a small 
sheath or hollow bract, and bifiircates 
into two fronds or pinnae, fringed by 
from ten to twelve leaflets, that nearly 
impinge on each other, and somewhat 
resemble in their mode of arrangement 
the leaflets of one of our commonest 
Aspleniums, — Asplenium trichomanes. 
One of our highest authorities, how- 
ever, in such matters (Professor Bal- 
four of Edinburgh) questions whether 
this organism be in reality a fern, and 
describes it from the specimen on the 
table, in the Palseontological chapter 
of his admirable Class Book, simply as 
" a remarkable pinnate frond." (Fig. 
13, p. 56.) We find it associated with 
the remains of a terrestrial plant allied 
to lepidodendron, and which in size and 
general appearance not a little resem- 
bles one of our commonest club mosses, 
— I/ycopocUum davatum^ It sends 



* I figured this species from an imperfect 

Cromarty specimen fifteen years ago. (See 

" Old Red Sandstone," first edition, 1841, Plate 

VII. Fig. 4). Of the greatly better specimens 

now figured I owe the larger one (Fig. 120) to 

Mrs. Mill, Thurso, who detected it in the richly 

fossiliferous flagstones of the locality in which 

she resides, and kindly made it over to me ; and 

the specimen of which I have given a magnificent representation (Fig. 12, 

p. 55) to my friend Mr. Robert Dick. I have, besides, seen several speci- 

37* 



438 ON THE LESS KNOWN 

out its brandies in exactly the same style, — some short 
and simple, others branched like the parent stem, — in an 
arrangement approximately alternate ; and is everywhere 
covered, stem and branch, by thickly set scale-like leaflets, 
that, suddenly narrowing, terminate in exceedingly slim 
points. It has, however, proportionally a stouter stem 
than Lycopodium ; its leaves, when seen in profile, seem 
more rectilinear and thin; and none of its branches yet 
found bear the fructiferous stalk or spike. Its resemblance, 
however, to this commonest of the Lycopodia, — a plant 
that may be gathered by handfuls on the moors by which 
the flagstones are covered, — is close enough to suggest a 
new reading of the familiar adage on the meeting of ex- 
tremes. Between the times of this ancient fossil, — one 
of the oldest of land plants yet known, — and those of the 
existing club moss that now scatters its light spores by 
millions over the dead and blackened remains of its remote 
predecessor, many creations must have intervened, and 
many a prodigy of the vegetable world appeared, especially 
in the earlier and middle periods, — Sigillaria, Favularia, 
Knorria, and Ulodendron, — that have had no representa- 
tives in the floras of latter times; and yet here, flanking 
the immense scale at both its ends, do we find plants of so 
nearly the same form and type, that it demands a careful 
survey to distinguish their points of diiference. Here, 
for instance, to illustrate the fact, is there a specimen of 
Lycopodium clavatum^ from one of these Caithness moors, 
that agrees branch for branch, and both in the disposition 
of its scales and in general outline, with the specimen in 
the stone. What seems to be an early representative of 
the Calamites occurs in the same beds. Some of the 

mens of the same organism, in a better or worse state of keeping, in the 
interesting collection of the Rev. Charles Clouston, Sandwick, near Strora- 
ness. 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 439 

specimens are of large size, — at least from nine inches to a 
foot in circumference, — and retain their thickness, though 
existing as fragments several feet in length, with but little 
diminution throughout. They resembled the interior casts 
of Calamites in behig longitudinally furrowed ; but the 
furrows are flatter, and are themselves minutely striated 
lengthwise by lines as fine as hairs ; and, instead of present- 
ing any appearance of joints, there run diagonally across 
the stems, interrupted and very irregular lines of knobs. 
These I find referred to by Dr. Joseph Hooker, in describ- 
ing a set of massive but ill preserved remains of the same 
organism detected in South Ness quarry, near Lerwick, by 
the Hon. Mr. Tuffnell, as taking, in two of the specimens, 
"the appearance of transverse knobs and bars (mayhap 
spirally arranged) that cross the striae obliquely. But 
though the knobs," he adds, "may perhaps indicate a 
peculiar character of the plants, they have more probably 
been caused by pressure during silicification." As, how- 
ever, they also occur in the best preserved fi-agment of the 
plant which I have yet seen, — a Thurso specimen which I 
owe to my friend Mr. Dick, — I deem it best to regard 
them, provisionally at least, as one of the characteristics of 
the plant. I may mention, that while I disinterred one 
of my specimens from the Thurso flagstones, where it 
occurred among remains of Dipterus and Asterolepis, I 
derived another specimen from the great overlying forma- 
tion of pale Red Sandstone to which the lofty hills of Hoy 
and the tall mural precipices of Dunnet Head belong ; and 
that this plant is the only organism which has yet been 
found in this uppermost member of the Lower Old Red, to 
at least the north of the Moray Frith. Another apparently 
terrestrial organism of the lower formation, of, however, 
rare occurrence, very much resembles a sheathing bract or 
spathe. It is of considerable size, — from four to six inches 



440 ON THE LESS KNOWN 

in length, by from two to three inches in breadth, — of a 
broadly elliptical and yet somewhat lanceolate form, deeply 
but irregularly corrugated, the rugae exhibiting a tendency 
to converge towards both its lower and upper terminations, 
and with, in some instances, what seems to be the fragment 
of a second spathe springing from its base. Another and 
much smaller vegetable organism of the same beds presents 
the form of a spathe-enveloped bud or unblown flower 
wraj)ped up in its calyx; but all the specimens which I 
have yet seen are too obscure to admit of certain deter- 
mination. I may here mention, that curious markings, 
which have been regarded as impressions made by vege- 
tables that had themselves disappeared, have been detected 
during the last twelvemonth in a quarry of the Lower Old 
Red Sandstone near Huntly, by the Rev. Mr. Mackay of 
Rhynie. They are very curious and very puzzhng; but 
though some of the specimens present the appearance of a 
continuous midrib, that throws off, with a certain degree 
of regularity, apparent leaflets, I am inclined to regard 
them rather as lying within the province of the ichnologist 
than of the fossil botanist. They bear the same sort of 
resemblance to a long, thickly-leaved frond, like that of the 
" hard fern," that the cast of a many-legged annelid does 
to a club moss ; and I was struck, on my first walk along 
the Portobello beach, after examining a specimen kindly 
sent me by Mr. Mackay, to see how nearly the tract of a 
small shore crab {Carcinus Moenas) along the wet sand 
resembled them, in exhibiting what seemed to be an ob- 
scure midrib fringed with leaflets. 

But the genuine vegetable organism of the formation, 
indicative of the highest rank of any yet found in it, is a 
true wood of the cone-bearing order. I laid open the 
nodule which contains this specimen, in one of the ichthyo- 
lite beds of Cromarty, rather more than eighteen years 



POSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 441 

ago ; but though I described it, in the first edition of my 
little work on the Old Red Sandstone, in 1841, as exhibit- 
ing the woody fibre, it was not until 1845 that, with the 
assistance of the optical lapidary, I subjected its structure 
to the test of the microscope. It turned out, as I had 
anticipated, to be the portion of a tree ; and on my submit- 
ting the prepared specimen to one of our highest authori- 
ties, — the late Mr. William Nicol, — he at once decided 
that the "reticulated texture of the transverse section, 
though somewhat compressed, clearly indicated a coniferous 
origin." I may add, that this most ancient of Scottish 
lignites presents several peculiarities of structure. Like 
some of the Araucarians of the warmer latitudes, it ex- 
hibits no lines of yearly growth; its medullary rays are 
slender, and comparatively inconspicuous ; and the discs 
which mottle the sides of its sap-chambers, when viewed in 
the longitudinal section, are exceedingly minute, and are 
ranged, so far as can be judged in their imperfect state of 
keeping, in the alternate order pecuUar to the Araucarians. 
On what perished land of the early Palaeozoic ages did this 
venerably antique tree cast root and flourish, when the 
extinct genera Pterichthys and Coccosteus were enjoying 
life by millions in the surrounding seas, long ere the flora 
or fauna of the Coal Measures had begun to be ? 

I may be here permitted to mention, that in a little 
volume, written in reply to a widely known and very in- 
genious work on the Development hypothesis, I described 
and figured this unequivocally genuine lignite, in order to 
show that a true wood takes its place among the earliest 
terrestrial plants known to the geologist. I at the same 
time mentioned, — desirous, of course, that the facts of the 
question should be fairly stated, whatever their bearing, — 
that the nodule in which it occurred had been partially 
washed out of the fish bed in which I found it, by the 



442 ON THE LESS KNOWN 

action of the surf; and my opponent, fixing on tlie circum- 
stance, insinuated, in the answer with which he honored 
me, that it had not belonged to the bed at all, but had 
been derived from some other formation of later date. He 
ought, however, to have taken into account my further 
statement, namely, that the same nodule which enclosed 
the lignite contained part of another fossil, the well marked 
scales of Diplacanthus striatus, an ichthyolite restricted, 
like the Coccosteus (a specimen of which occurred in a 
neighboring nodule), to the Lower Old Red Sandstone 
exclusively. If there be any value whatever in palgeonto- 
logical evidence, this Cromarty Hgnite must have been 
deposited in a sea inhabited by the Coccosteus and Dipla- 
canthus. It is demonstrable that, while yet in the recent 
state, a Diplacanthus lay down and died beside it ; and the 
evidence in the case is unequivocally this, that in the oldest 
portion of the oldest terrestrial flora yet known, there 
occurs the fragment of a tree quite as high in the scale as 
the stately Norfolk Island pine, or the noble cedar of 
Lebanon. 

[I have failed hitherto in finding any remains of terres- 
trial plant-covered surfaces in the Old Red Sandstone of 
Scotland, though decided traces of desiccated sub-aerial 
ones are not rare. Shallows and banks seem to have been 
numerous during the period of at least the Lower forma- 
tion. The flagstones of Caithness and Orkney, and the 
argillaceous fish beds of Cromarty and Ross, not only 
abound in the rij)ple-marked surfaces of a shallow sea, 
but also in cracked and flawed planes that must have dried 
and split into polygonal partings in the air and the sun. 
The appearance of these in the neighborhood of the town 
of Thurso, about half a mile to the east of the river, is not 
a little curious. Bearing throughout the general dingy 
hue of the flagstones, they yet consist of alternating beds 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 443 

of two distinct characters and qualities. The one kind, 
fissile, finely grained, and sharply ripple-marked, seems to 
have been deposited in shallow water ; the other, not fissile, 
but, if I may so speak, felted together so as to yield Avith 
difiiculty to the hammer in any direction, and traversed by 
polygonal partings, filled up usually by the substance of the 
overlying stratum, appears to have had a different origin. 
The state of keeping, too, in which the ichthyic remains of 
these alternating beds occur is always very different. The 
smaller and more delicately organized fishes are never found 
entire, save in the fissile, finely grained beds ; in the others 
we detect only scattered fragments ; and even these, unless 
they belonged to the robust Asterolepis or his congeners, — 
which, however, in these beds they usually do, — much 
broken. The polygonal partings seem to indicate that 
these toughly-felted beds, whose very style of weathering 
— rough, gnarled, fretted into globose protuberances and 
irregular hollows — shows that it had not been formed by 
quiet deposition, must have had their broad backs raised 
for a time above the surface of the water, to be desiccated 
in the hot sun. And the fragmentary state of the fossils 
which they contain seems to point, Avith the roughnesses 
of their weathered surfaces, to some peculiarity in their 
origin. The recollection which they awoke in my mind 
with each visit I paid them for three years together, may 
probably indicate what that origin was. I had a relation 
who died more than a quarter of a century ago, who passed 
many years in British Guiana, in the colony of Berbice, and 
whose graphic descriptions of that part of South America 
made a strong impression upon me when a boy, and still 
dwells in my memory. He was settled on a cotton planta- 
tion near the coast side ; and so exceedingly flat was the 
surrounding country, that the house in which he dwelt, 
though nearly two miles distant from the shore, stood little 



444 ON THE LESS KNOWN 

more than five feet above its level. The soil consisted of a 
dark gray consolidated mud ; and in looking seawards from 
the margin of the land, there was nothing to be seen, when 
the tide fell, save dreary mud flats whole miles in extent, 
with the line of blue water beyond stretching along the 
distant horizon. These mud flats were much frequented 
by birds of the wader family, that used to come and fish in 
the shallow pools for the small fry that had lingered behind 
when the tide fell ; and my cousin, a keen sportsman in his 
day, has told me that he used to steal upon them in his 
mud shoes, — flat boards attached to the soles, like the 
snow shoes of the higher latitudes, — and enjoy rare sport 
in knocking down magnificent game, such as " the roseate 
spoonbill" and "gorgeous flamingo." There were times, 
however, when the mud shoe proved of no avail, and the 
flat expanse remained impassable for weeks, — 

" A boggy syrtis, neither sea 
Nor good dry land." 

The coast, — directly impinged on by the drift current, and 
beaten by the long roll of waves which had first begun to 
rise under the impulsions of the trade winds on the African 
coast two thousand miles away, — was much exposed to 
tempests ; and after every iresh storm from the east, a 
huge bank of mud used to come rolling in from the sea, 
three or four feet abreast, and remain wholly impassable 
until, during some two or three neap tides, its surface had 
been exposed to a tropical sun, and partially consolidated 
by the heat. And then the waste would become passable 
as before, and the chopped and broken surface, exposed to 
the ordinary action of the sea, and to gradual depositions 
during flood, would begin to be smoothed over, and the 
birds would find themselves no longer safe. N"ow, I am 
inclined to think that we have here the conditions necessary 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 445 

to the formation of the Thurso deposits. Let us suppose, 
near where Thui'so now stands, a wide tract of flat mud 
banks in a sea so shallow as to be laid dry at ebb for miles 
together. Let us further suppose periods of tranquil depo- 
sition or re-arrangement, during which one ripple-marked 
stratum is laid quietly down over another, and the fish, 
killed by accident, or left stranded by the evaporation of 
the little j^ools, are covered up, like the plants m a botanist's 
drying-book, in a state of complete entireness. Let us yet 
further suppose great mud banks driven by occasional 
tempests from the deeper water beyond, and so heaped up 
over these sedimentary beds as to be exposed during even 
the flood of neap tides to the desiccating influences of the 
atmosphere and the sun, until the surface has become hard 
as a sun-burned brick, and has cho2:)j)ed into polygonal 
partings, with wide rents between. And finally, let us 
suppose the whole in this state laid under water at the 
return of stream tides, and exposed to the ordinary sedi- 
mentary action. Does it not seem probable that the 
alternating beds in all their conditions would be given us 
by such a process? In the stratum represented by the 
mud bank, the stone would be of what I have termed a 
felted^ not a fissile character; its organic remains would 
exist in a fragmentaiy and scattered state, — for, torn up 
from their places of original deposition, and rolled onwards 
in the storm-impelled mud, they could not fail to be broken 
up and dispersed ; and further, they would be in large part 
those of bulky deep-sea fishes. And lastly, the surface of 
these beds would be polygonally cracked and flawed, and 
the -wider cracks filled up by the substance of the overlying 
strata. And these overlyir g strata, on the other hand, — 
the result of a period of quiet deposition in shallow water, 
— would be regularly bedded, and their ichthyic remains, 
cousLstiiig mainly of small littoral fishes, would be preserved 



446 ONTHELESSKNOWN 

in a state of comparative entireness. For, however, such 
numerous repetitions of alternately felted and fissile ripple^ 
marked strata as we find in the neighborhood of Thurso, — ■ 
repetitions carried on for hundreds of feet in vertical extent, 
— we require yet another condition, — that condition of 
gradual subsidence in the general crust which can alone 
account for the fact so often pressed upon the geologist in 
exploring the Coal Measures, that in deposits thousands of 
feet in thickness, each stratum in succession had been laid 
down in a shallow sea.] 

It is a curious circumstance, that the Old Red flag- 
stones which lie along the southern flanks of the Gram- 
pians, and are represented by the gray stone known in 
commerce as the Arbroath Pavement, have not, so far as 
is yet known, %an organism in common with the Old Red 
flagstones of the north. I at one time supposed that the 
rectilinear, smooth-stemmed fucoid, already described, 
occurred in both series, as the gray stones have also their 
smooth-stemmed, rectilinear, tape-like organism ; but the 
points of resemblance were too few and simple to justify 
the conclusion that they were identical, and I have since 
ascertained that they were entirely different plants. The 
fucoid of the Caithness flagstones threw off, as I have 
shown, in the alternate order, numerous ribbon-like 
branches or fronds ; whereas the ribbon-like fronds or 
branches of the Forfarshire plant rose by dozens from a 
common root, like the fronds of Zostera, and somewhat 
resembled a scourge of cords fastened to a handle. Con- 
temporary with this organism of the gray flagstone forma- 
tion, and thickly occupying the planes on which it rests, 
there occur fragments of twisted stems, some of them from 
three to four inches in diameter (though represented by 
but mere films of carbonaceous matter), and irregularly 
streaked, or rather wrinJded^ longitudinally, Uke the bark 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 447 

of some of our forest trees, though on a smaller scale. 
Witli these we find in considerable abundance irregularly- 
shaped patches, also of carbonaceous matter, reticulated 
into the semblance of polygonal, or, in some instances, 
egg-shaped meshes, and which remmd one of pieces of 
ill woven lace. When first laid o2>en, these meshes are 
filled each with a carbonaceous ?peck ; and, from their 
supposed resemblance, in the aggregated form, to the eggs 
of the frog in their albuminous envelop, the quarriers 
term them " puddock [frog] spawn." The slabs in which 
they occur, thickly covered over with their vegetable 
impressions, did certainly remind me, when I first exam- 
ined them some fifteen years ago, of the bottom of some 
stagnant ditch beside some decaying hedge, as it appears 
in middle spring, when paved with fragments of dead 
branches and withered grass, and mottled with its life- 
impregnated patches of the gelid substance regarding 
which a provincial poet tells his readers, in classical 
Scotch, that 

" Puddock-spue is fu' o' e'en. 
An' every e'e 's a pu-head." * 

Higher authorities than the quarriers, — among the rest, 
the late Dr. Mantell, — have been disposed to regard these 
polygonal markings as the fossilized spawn of ancient 
Batrachians ; but there now seems to be evidence enough 
from which to conclude that they are the remains, not of 
the eggs of an animal, but of the seed of a plant. Such 
was the view taken many years ago by Dr. Fleming, — the 
original discoverer, let me add, of fossils both in those 
Upper and Middle Old Red Sandstone deposits that lie 
in Scotland to the south of the Grampians. " These 

* " Frogspawn is full of eyes [that is, black eye-like points], and every 
«ye is a tadpole." 



448 ON THE LESS KNOWN 

organisms," ^ye find him saying, in a paper published in 
"Cheek's Edinbm-gh Journal" (1831), "occur in the 
form of circular flat patches, not equalling an inch in 
diameter, and composed of numerous smaller contiguous 
pieces. They are not unlike what might be expected to 
result from a compressed berry, such as the bramble or 
the rasp. As, however, they are found adjacent to the 
narrow leaves of gramineous [looking] vegetables, and 
chiefly in clay slate, originally lacustrine silt, it is probable 
that they constituted the conglobate panicles of extinct 
species of the genus Junicus or Sparzanium." From 
specimens subsequently found by Dr. Fleming, and on 
which he has erected his species JParka decipiens, it seema 

Fig 121. 




PARKA DECIPIENS. 



evident that the nearly circular bodies (which in all the 
better preserved instances circumscribe the small poly- 
gonal ones) were set in receptacles somewhat resembling 
the receptacle or calyx of the strawberry or rasp. Judg- 
ing from one of the specimens, this calyx appears to have 
consisted of five pieces, which united in a central stem, 
and were traversed by broad irregularly diverging stria3. 
And the spawn-like patches of Carmylie appear to be 
simply ill preserv^ed specimens of this fruit, whatever its 
true character, in which the minute circular portions, 
divested of the receptacle and stem, had been thrown 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 449 

into irregular forms by the joint agency of pressure and 
decay. Tlie great abundance of these organisms, — for so 
abundant are they, that visitors to the Carmylie quarries 
find they can carry away with them as many specimens 
as they please, — may be regarded as of itself indicative 
of a vegetable origin.* It is not in the least strange, 
however, that they should have been taken for patches 
of spawn. The large-grained spawn of fishes, such as the 
lump-fish, salmon, or sturgeon, might be readily enough 
mistaken, in even the recent state, for the detached 
spherical-seed vessels of fruit, such as the bramble-berry, 
the stone-bramble, or the rasp. " Hang it ! " I once heard 
a countryman exclaim, on helping himself at table to a 
spoonful of Caviare, which he had mistaken for a sweet- 
meat, and instantly, according to Milton, " with sputter- 
ing noise rejected," — " Hang it for nasty stuff! — I took it 
for bramble berry jam." 

Along with these curious remains Dr; Fleming found an 
organism which in form somewhat resembles the spike of 
one of the grasses, save that the better preserved bracts 
terminate in fan or kidney-shaped leaflets, with a simple 
venation radiating from the base. It is probably a fern, 
more minute in its pinnules than even our smallest speci- 
mens of true maidenhair. Its stipes, however, seems pro- 
portionally stouter than that of any of the smaller ferns 
with which I am acquainted. But the state of keeping of 
the specimen is not good, nor do I know that another has 
yet been found. Further, in the same beds Dr. Fleming 
found a curious nondescript vegetable, or rather part of a 
vegetable, with smooth narrow stems, resembling those of 

* Mr. Page figures, in his "Advanced Text Book of Geology" (p. 127), 

a few circular markings from the Forfarshire beds, which he still regards 

as spawn, probably that of a Cnistacean, and Avhich certainly differ greatly 

in appearance from the markings found enclosed in the apparent spathcs. 

38* 



450 ON THE LESS KNOWN 

the smootli-stemmed organism of the Caithness flagstones, 

Fig. 122. 




but Tinlike it in the circumstance that its detached nearly 
123. parallel stalks anastomose with each other by 
means of cross branches, that unite them in 
the middle, somewhat in the style of the 
Siamese twins. I have heard the doctor 
suggest, but know not whether he has 
placed the remark on record, that these par- 
allel stems may have been but the internal 
fibres of some larger plant, whose more suc- 
culent portions have disappeared ; and cer- 
tainly, while such instances of anastomosis 
are rare among the stems of plants, they are 
common enough among thoir internal fibres^ 
as all who have examined the macerated 
debris of a kitchen-garden or a turnip-field 

must have had occasion to remark. We somQtimes, how- 




FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 451 

ever, find cases of anastomosis among the stems of even the 
higher plants. I have seen oftener than once, in neglected 
liawthorn hedges, the branch of one plant entering into the 
stem of another, and beconnng incorporated with its sub- 
stance ; and we are told by Professor Balfour, that this kind 
of chance adhesion is often seen in the branches of the ivy ; 
and that not unfrequently, by a similar process, the roots 
of contiguous trees are united. Nor does it seem improb- 
able, that what occasionally takes place among the higher 
plants of the present time may have been common among 
some of the comparatively low plants of so ancient a period 
as that of the Middle Old Red Sandstone. This formation 
of the gray tilestones has furnished one vegetable organism 
apparently higher in the scale than those just described, in 
a well marked Lepidodendron, which exliibits, like the 
Araucarian of the Lower Old Red, though less distinctly, 
the internal structure. It was found about sixteen years 
ago in a pavement quarry near Clockbriggs, — the last 
station on the Aberdeen and Forfar Railway as the trav- 
eller aj>proaches the town of Forfar from the north. I 
owe my specimen of this ancient Lepidodendron to Mr. 
William Miller, banker, Dundee, an accomplished geolo- 
gist, who has taken no little trouble in determining its 
true history. He has ascertained that it occurred deep in 
the rock, seventy-one feet from the surface ; that the beds 
which rested over it were composed, in the descending or- 
der, first, of a conglomerate thirty feet thick ; secondly, of 
a red rock four feet thick ; thirdly, of twenty-eight feet of 
the soft shaly substance known to the quarriers as caulm ; 
and fourthly, of more than nine feet of gray pavement, 
immediately under which, in a soft, argillaceous stratum, 
lay the organism. It was about four feet in length, bulged 
out at the lower end into a bulb-like protuberance, which 
may have been, however, merely an accidental result of its 



452 OIT THE LESS KNOWN 

State of keeping ; and threw off, at an acute angle, two 
branches about a foot from the top. It Avas covered with 
a bark of brittle coal, which is, however, wanting in all the 
fragments that have been preserved ; and was resolved in- 
ternally into a brown calcareous substance of about the 
hardness of ordinary marble, and very much resembling 
that into which the petrifactive agencies have consolidated 
the fossil trees of Granton and Craigleith. From the de- 
corticated condition of the surviving fragments, and the 
imperfect preseiwation of the interior structure, in all save 
the central portions of its transverse sections, it yields no 
specific marks by which to distinguish it ; but enough re- 
mains in its irregular network of cells, devoid of Hnear 
arrangement, and untraversed by medullary rays, to demon- 
strate its generic standing as a Lepidodendron. 

[It has been questioned whether the lower place in the 
Old Red System should be assigned to the flagstones of 
Caithness and Ross, Avith their characteristic Dipterus and 
Coccosteus beds, or to the gray tilestones of Forfar and 
Kincardineshires, with their equally characteristic Cepha- 
laspis. The evidence on the point is certainly not so con- 
clusive as I deemed it fifteen years ago, when our highest 
authority on the subject not only regarded the tilestone of 
the Silurian regions of England as a member of the Old 
Red Sandstone (an arrangement which I am still disposed 
to deem the true one), but also held further, that there had 
been detected in this formation near Downtown Castle, 
Herefordshire, broken remains of Dipterus macrolepidotus, 
one of the best marked ichthyolites of the flagstones of 
Caithness and Orkney. A great and unbroken series of 
fossiliferous rocks, with Dipterus at its base, Cej^halaspis in 
its medial spaces, and Holoptychius at its top, might well 
be regarded as the analogue of the Old Red of Scotland, 
with the Caithness flagstones ranged at its bottom, the 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 453 

Ceplialaspis beds of Forfarshire placed in its middle, and 
the Iloloptychius beds of Scot-Crag and Clashbinnie on its 
upper horizon ; but since that time the tilestones have been 
transferred to the Upper Silurian division of rocks, and the 
evidence furnished by their supposed Dipterus has not been 
confirmed. And as the Old Red Sandstones of Scotland 
have no true fossiliferous base, but rest on primary rocks 
both to the south and north of the Grampians, it may be 
regarded as in some degree a moot point whether the 
lowest fossiliferous beds to the north be older or newer 
than those to the south, or, what is quite possible, of the 
same age. Provisionally, however, I have arranged my 
paper on the supposition that the Coccostean formation of 
the north is the lowest and oldest of the three ; and this 
from the following considerations. In the first place, the 
Coccosteus and its contemporaries appear in the north at a 
very short distance above the base of the system. I have 
disinterred an Osteolepis from a fish bed near Cromarty 
only thirty-three feet over the great conglomerate, and only 
a hundred and twenty-nine feet over the granitic gneiss 
beneath; whereas the Cephalaspis beds occur high above 
the primary base of the system in the south, — at some dis- 
tance over even the thick conglomerate of Stonehaven and 
Dunnottar ; and under this conglomerate, as shown in the 
section furnished by the valley of the IsTorth Esk, there lies 
a pale red sandstone member of the system, estimated by 
Colonel Imrie at seven hundred and eighty feet in thick- 
ness. The conglomerate itself he estimates at tAvelve hun- 
dred feet. Adopting as correct Colonel Imrie's section, 
taken along the banks of the North Esk, — and the colo- 
nel was unquestionably a truthful observer, — the Cepha- 
laspis beds of the south lie nearly two thousand (nineteen 
hundred and eighty) feet above the Azoic slates on which 
the Old Red Sandstone of Forfarshire rests, whereas the 



454 ON THE LESS KNOWN 

Coccosteus and Osteolepis beds of the north lie only one 
hundred and twenty-nine feet over the Azoic gneiss on 
which the Old Red Sandstone of Cromarty rests. There 
is thus at least room in the south for an underlying fossil- 
iferous formation between that of the Cephalaspis and the 
base of the system, but none in the north beneath that of 
the Coccosteus and its base. In the north we find the 
room lying above, between the Coccostean and Holop- 
tychian formations, and represented by that great unfossil- 
iferous dejDOsit of pale sandstone to w^hich the hills of Hoy 
and the rocks of Duncansbay Head and of Tarbet Ness 
belong. Further, in the second place, while the upper or 
Holoptychian formation is found directly overlying that of 
the Coccosteus in only one locality, — Moray, — we find it 
directly overlying that of the Cephalaspis in two widely sep- 
arated localities ; — in the vast band of Old Red w^hich runs 
diagonally across the island from sea to sea, parallel to the 
Grampian chain, and in the immensely developed Red Sand- 
stones of England and Wales. And it is of course more 
probable that the two corroborative instances should repre- 
sent the natural succession of the formations, and the single 
instance the accidental gap in the scale consequent on the 
missing formation, than that, vice versa, the solitary in- 
stance should re]3resent the natural succession, while the 
two mutually corroborative ones should represent, in locali- 
ties widely apart, the mere accident of the gap. But, in the 
third place, I attach more weight to a conclusion founded on 
the positive character of the groups of organic remains 
by which the three great formations of the Old Red Sys- 
tem are characterized, than I do to either of these con- 
siderations. The organisms of the Cephalaspian deposits 
differ generically, and in their whole aspect, from both 
those of the Coccostean and Holoptychian formations; 
whereas tlie organisms of the Coccostean formations, while 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 455 

they resemble generically and in the group those of the 
Holoptychian one, mainly differ from them specifically. 
The extreme generic difference in the one case argues 
evidently a great difference in condition^ — the lesser spe- 
cific difference in the other, a great difference in point 
of time. The Cephalaspian formation might, as a fresh 
water formation, be nearly contemporary with either of 
the other two, or, as seems more probable, interposed 
between them ; while they themselves, on the other hand, 
generically similar and decidedly marine in their character, 
must have been so widely separated in time, that all the 
species of the lower group became extinct ere those of 
the upper one had been ushered into being. And such 
are some of the considerations that still lead me, notwith- 
standing the failure of previous evidence, to hold, at least, 
provisionally, that our Scottish flagstones to the north of 
the Grampians occupy a lower horizon than our Scottish 
tilestones to the south. It must, however, be stated, on 
the other hand, that the crustaceans of the gray tilestones 
of Forfar and Kincardine not a little resemble those of 
the Upper Silurian and red tilestone beds of England ; 
and that, judging from the ichthyodorulites found in both, 
their fishes must have been at least generically allied. 
The crustaceans of the upper Silurian of Lesmahagow, 
too, seem certainly much akin to those of the Forfarshire 
tilestones.] 

Above this gray tilestone formation lies the Upper 
Old Red Sandstone, with its peculiar group of ichthyic 
organisms, none of which seem specially identical with 
those of either the Caithness or the Forfarshire beds. 
For it is an interesting circumstance, suggestive surely 
of the vast periods which must have elapsed during its 
deposition, that the great Old Red System has, as I have 
just said, its three distinct platforms of organic existence, 



450 ON THE LESS KNOWN 

each wholly different from the others. Generically and in 
the group, however, the Upper fishes much more closely 
resemble, I repeat, the fishes of the Lower or Caithness 
and Cromarty platform, than they do those of the Forfar- 
shire and Kincardine one. The vegetable remains of the 
Upper formation in Scotland are both rare and ill pre- 
served. I have seen what I deemed fucoidal markings 
dimly impressed on the planes of some of the strata, not 
in the carbonaceous form so common in the other two 
formations, but as mere colored films of a deeper red than 
the surrounding matrix. Further, I have detected in the 
jsame beds, and existing in the same state, fragments of a 
Btriated organism, which may have formed part of either a 
true calamite, like those of the Coal Measures, or of some 
such striated but jointless vegetable as that of the Lower 
Old Red of Thurso and Lerwick.* With these markings 

* Since these sentences were written I have seen a description of both the 
plants of the Upper Old Red to which they refer, in an interesting sketch of 
the geology of Roxhurgshire by the Rev. James Duncan, which forms part 
of a recent publication devoted to the historyiand antiquities of the shire. 
•* In the red quarry of Dcnholm Hill there occurs," says Mr. Duncan, " a 
stratum of soft yellowish sandstone, which contains impressions of an 
apparent fucoid in considerable quantity. One or several linear stems 
diverge from a point, and throw off at acute angles, as they grow upwards, 
branches or leaves very similar to the stem, which are in turn subdivided 
into others. The width of the stalks is generally about a quarter of an 
inch, the length often a foot. The color is brown, blackish-brown, or 
grayish. The same plant also occurs in the whitestone quarry [an over- 
lying bed] in the form of Carbonaceous impressions. There can be little 
doubt that it is a fucoid. The general mode of growth greatly resembles 
Ihat of certain seaweeds ; and in some specimens we have seen the 
branches dilated a little at the extremities, like those of such of the living 
fuci as expand in order to afford space for the fructification. It is deser\ing 
of remark, that the plant is seldom observed lying horizontally on the 
rock in a direction parallel to its stratification, but rising up thi'ough the 
layers, so as only to be seen when the stone is broken across; as if it had 
been standing erect, or kept buoyant in water, while the stony matter to 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 457 

ferns are occasionally found ; and to one of these, from the 
light which it throws on the true place in the scale of a 
series of deposits in a sister country, there attaches no little 
interest. I owe my specimen to Mr. John Stewart of 
Edinburgh, who laid it open in a micaceous red sandstone 
in the quarry of Prestonhaugh, near Dunse, where it is 
associated with some of the better known ichthyic organ- 
isms of the Upper Old Red Sandstone, such as Pterichthys 
major and Holoptychius Nbbilissimus. Existing as but a 
deep red film in the rock, with a tolerably well defined 
outline, but without trace of the characteristic venation on 
which the fossil botanist, in dealing with the ferns, foimds 
his generic distinctions, I could only determine that it was 
either a Cyclopterus or Neuropterus. My collection was 
visited, however, by the late lamented Edward Forbes, only 



which it owes its preservation was deposited around it." Mr. Duncan, 
after next referring to the remains of what he deems a land plant, derived 
from the same deposit, and Avliioh, though sadly mutilated, presents not 
a little of the appearance of the naked framework of a frond of Cyclopterus 
Plibernicus divested of the leaflets, goes on to describe the apparent cala- 
mite of the formation. " The best preserved vegetable remain yet found 
in Denholm Hill quarry," he says, is the radical portion of what we can- 
not hesitate to call a species of calamite. The lower part is regularly and 
beautifully rounded, bulging and prominent, nearly four inches in diam- 
eter. About an inch from the bottom it contracts somewhat suddenly in 
two separate stages, and from the uppermost sends up a stem about an 
inch in diameter, and nearly of the same length, where it is broken across. 
At the origin of this stem the small longitudinal ridges are distinctly 
marked; and the whole outline of the figure, though converted into stone, 
is as well defined as it could have been in the living plant." Mr. Duncan 
accompanies his description with a figure of the organism described, 
which, however, rather resembles the bulb of a liliaceous plant than the 
root of a calamite, which in all the better preserved specimens contracts, 
instead of expanding, as it descends. The apparent expansion, however, 
in the Old Red specimen may be simply a result of compression in its 
upper part ; the under part certainly much resembles, in the dome-like 
symmetry of its outline, the radical termination of a solitaiy calamite. 
39 



458 



ON THE LESS KNOWN 



a few weeks before his death ; and he at once recognized in 
my Berwickshire fern, so unequivocally an organism of the 
Upper Old Red, the Cydopterus Hlbernicus of thois-^cj 



Fig. 124. 




CTCLOPTERUS HIBERNICUS. 



largely developed beds of yellow sandstone which form so 
marked a feature in the geology of the south of Ireland, 
and whose true place, whether as Uj)per Old Red or Lower 
Carboniferous, has been the subject of so much controversy. 
I had been previously introduced by Professor Forbes, in 
tlie Museum of Economic Geology in Jermyn Street, Lon- 
don, to an interesting collection of plants from these yellow 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 459 

beds, and had an opportunity afforded me of examining the 
only ichthyic organism hitherto found associated with 
them ; and was struck, though I could not identify its 
species, with its peculiarly Old Red aspect ; but the evi- 
dence of the Cyclopterus is of course more conclusive than 
that of the fish ; and we may, I think, legitimately con- 
clude, that in Ireland, as in our own country, it was a 
contemporary of the great Pterichthys {P. major) ^ — the 
hugest, and at least one of the last, of his race, — and gave 
its rich green to the hill sides of what is still the Emerald 
Island during the latter ages of the Old Red Sandstone, 
and ere the Carboniferous period had yet begun. The 
Cyclopterus Sihernicus^ as shown both by the Preston- 
haugh specimen and those of Ireland, was a bipinnate fern 
of very considerable size, — probably a tree fern. Its 
pinnae, opposite in the lower part of the frond, are alternate 
in the upper ; while its leaflets, which are of a sub-rhom- 
boidal form, and so closely ranged as to impinge on each 
other, are at least generally alternate in their arrangement 
throughout. Among living plants it seems most nearly 
represented by a South American species, — Didymocloena 
pulcherritna^ — one of the smaller tree ferns. The leaves 
of this graceful species are bipinnate, like those of the fossil ; 
and the pinnae (thickly set with simple, alternately arranged 
leaflets) are opposite in the lower part of the frond, and 
alternate in the upper. Widely as they are separated in 
time, the recent South American Didymocloena and the Old 
Red Sandstone Cyclopterus, that passed into extinction 
ere the times of the Coal, might be ranged together, so far 
at least as appears from their forms, as kindred species. It 
were very desirable that we had a good monograph of the 
Irish Old Red plants, the contemporaries of the latter, as 
the completcst and best preserved representatives of the 
Middle Palaeozoic flora yet found. Sir Roderick Murchison 



4.60 ON THE LESS KNOWN 

has figured a single pinnae of this Cyclopterus in his recently- 
published " Siluria ; " and Sir Charles Lyell, both that and 
one of its contemporary Lepidodendra, in the last edition 
of his " Elements. " These interesting fragments, however, 
serve but to excite our curiosity for more. When urging 
Professor Edward Forbes on the subject, ere partmg from 
him for, alas ! what proved to be the last time, he intimated 
an intention of soon taking it up ; but I fear his purposed 
monograph represents only one of many works, important 
to science, which his untimely death has arrested for may- 
hap long years to come. 

In the uppermost beds of the Upper Old Red foi-mation 
in Scotland, which are usually of a pale or light yelloAv 
color, the vegetable remains again become strongly car- 
bonaceous, but their state of preservation continues bad, — 
too bad to admit of the determination of either species or 
genera ; and not until we rise a very little beyond the 
system do we find the remains of a flora either rich or well 
preserved. But very remarkable is the change which at 
this stage at once occurs. We pass at a single stride from 
great poverty to great wealth. The suddenness of the 
change seems suited to remind one of that experienced by 
the voyager, w^hen, — after traversing for many days some 
wide expanse of ocean, unvaried save by its banks of 
floating sea weed, or, where occasionally and at wide 
intervals, he picks up some leaf-bearing bough, or marks 
some fragment of drift weed go floating past, — he enters 
at length the sheltered lagoon of some coral island, and 
sees all around the deep green of a tropical vegetation 
descending in tangled luxuriance to the water's edge, — • 
tall, erect ferns, and creeping lycopodiacese, and the pan- 
danus, with its gsrial roots and its screw-like clusters of 
narrow leaves, and, high over all, tall palms, \\'ith their 
huge pinnate fronds, and their curiously aggregated 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 4G1 

groups of massive fruit. And yet the more meagre vege- 
tation of the earlier time is not without its special interest. 
The land plants of the Old Red Sandstone seem to com- 
pose, all over the world, the most ancient of the terrestrial 
floras. It Avas held only a few years ago, that the Silurians 
of the United States had their plants allied to the Lepido- 
dendron. But the group in which these occur has since 
been transferred from the Upper Silurian to the Old Red 
System ; and we find it expressly stated by Professor II. 
D. Rogers, in his valuable contribution to the " Physical 
Atlas" (second edition, 1856), that " the Cadent [or Lower 
Old Red] strata are the oldest American formations in 
which remains of a true terrestrial vegetation have yet 
been discovered." It has been shown, too, by Sir Roderick 
Murchison, that the supposed Silurian plants of Oporto are 
in reality Carboniferous, and owe their apparent position 
to a reverse folding of the strata. I have already referred 
to the solitary spore-cases of the Ludlow Rocks ; and 
beneath these rocks, says Sir Roderick (1854), " no remains 
of plants have been discovered which are recognizably of 
terrestrial origin." Scanty, too, as the terrestrial flora of 
the Old Red Sandstone everywhere is, we find it exhibiting 
very definitely the leading Palaeozoic features. Its pre- 
vailing plants are the ferns and their apparent allies. It 
has in our own country, as has been just shown, its ferns, 
its lepidodendra, its striated plants allied to the calamites, 
and its decided araucanite ; in America, in the Cadent 
series, it had its " plants allied to ferns and lepidodendra ; " 
and m the Devonian basin of Sabero m Spain, its charac- 
teristic organisms are, a lepidodendron (X. Chemung ensis)^ 
and a very peculiar fern (^henopteris laxus)* But while 

* " Though the coal of Sabero is apparently included in Devonian 
rocks," says Sir Roderick Murchison, " M. Casiano de Prado thinks that 
this appearance may be due to inverted folds of the strata." On the other 
39* 



462 ON THE LESS KNOWN, ETC. 

in its main features it resembled the succeeding flora of the 
Carboniferous period, it seems in all its forms to have been 
specifically distinct. It was the indejDendent flora of an 
earlier creation than that to which we owe the coal. For 
the meagreness of the jDaper in which I have attempted to 
desci-ibe it as it occurs in Scotland, I have but one apology 
to offer. My lecture contains but little ; but then, such is 
the scantiness of the materials on which I had to work, 
that it could not have contained much : if, according to the 
dramatist, the "amount be beggarly," it is because the 
" boxes are empty. " Partly, apparently, from the circum- 
stance that the organisms of this flora were ill suited for 
preservation in the rocks, and partly because, judging from 
what appears, the most ancient lands of the globe were 
widely scattered and of narrow extent, this oldest of the 
floras is everywhere the most meagre. 

hand, M. Alcide D'Orbigny regards it as decidedly Old Red; and certainly 
its Sphenopteris and Lepidodendron bear much more the aspect of Devo- 
nian than of Carboniferous plants. 



LECTURE TWELFTH. 

ON THE LESS KNOWN FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 
PART II. 

In the noble flora of the Coal Measures much still re- 
mains to be done in Scotland. Our Lower Carboniferous 
rocks are of immense development ; the Limestones of 
Burdiehouse, with their numerous terrestrial plants, occur 
many hundred feet beneath our Mountain Limestones ; 
and our list of vegetable species j^eculiar to these lower 
deposits is still very incomplete. Even in those higher 
Carboniferous rocks with which the many coal workings of 
the country have rendered us comparatively familiar, there 
appears to be still a good deal of the new and the unknoA\n 
to repay the labor of future exploration. It was only last 
year that Mr. Gourlay* of this city (Glasgow) added to 
our fossil flora a new Volkmannia from the coal field of 
Carluke ; and I detected very recently in a neighboring 
locality (the Airdrie coal field), though in but an indiflferent 
state of keeping, what seems to be a new and very peculiar 
fern. It presents at first sight more the appearance of a 

* Now, alas! no more. In Mr. Gourlay the energy and shrewd busi- 
ness habits of the accomplished merchant were added to an enlightened 
zeal for general science, and no inconsiderable knowledge in both the 
geologic and botanic provinces. The marked success, in several respects, 
of the brilliant meeting of the British Association which held in Glasgow 
in September, 1855, was owing in no small measure to the indefatigable 
exertions and well calculated arrangements of Mr. Goui-lay. 



464 ON THE LESS KXOWN 

Cycadaceous frond than any other vegetable organism of 
the Carboniferous age which I have yet seen. From a 
mid stem there proceed at right angles, and in alternate 

Fig. 125. 




order, a series of sessile, lanceolate, acute leaflets, nearly 
two inches in length by about an eighth part of an inch in 
breadth, and about three lines apart. Each is furnished 
wdth a slender midrib ; and, what seems a singular, though 
not entirely unique, feature in a fern, their edges are 
densely hirsute, and bristle with thick, short hair, nearly as 
stiff as prickles. The venation is not distinctly preserved ; 
but enough remains to show that it must have been pecu- 
liar, — apparently radiating outwards from a series of 
centres ranged along the midrib. Nay, the apparent hairs 
seem to be but prolongations of the nerves carried beyond 
the edges of the leaflets. There is a Stigmaria, too, on the 
table, very ornate in its sculpture, of which I have now 
found three specimens in a quarry of the Lower Coal Meas- 
ures near Portobello, that has still to be figured and 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 



465 



described. In this richly ornamented Stigmaria the 
Fig. 126. characteristic areolae present the ordi- 

nary aspect. Each, however, forms the 
centre of a sculptured star, consisting 
of from eighteen to twenty rays, or 
rather the centre of a sculptured flower 
of the composite order, resembling a 
meadow daisy or sea-aster. The mi- 
nute petals, — if we are to accept the 
latter comparison, — are of an irregu- 
larly lenticular form, generally entire, 
but in some instances ranged in two, or 
even three, concentric lines round the 
depressed centre of the areolae ; while 
the interspaces outside are occupied by 
numerous fretted markings, resembling 
broken fragments of petals, which, 
though less regularly ranged than the 
others, are effective in imparting a 
richly ornate aspect to the whole. 
Ever since the appearance, in 1846, of Mr. Binney's 

paper on the relations of stigmaria to sigillaria as roots 

and stems, I have been looking 

for distinguishing specific marks 

among the former; and, failing 

for a time to find any, I concluded 

that, though the stems of the 

sigillarian genus were variously 

sculptured, their roots might in all 

the species have been the same. 

The present rich specimen does 

seem, however, to bear the specific 

stamp ; and, from the peculiar 

character of the termination of another specimen on the 




STIGMAEIA. 







THE SAME, MAGNIFIED 




466 



ON THE LESS KNOWN 



Fig. 128 



table, I am inclined to hold tliat the stigmaria may have 
borne the appearance rather of underground stems than of 
proper roots. This specimen suddenly terminates, at a 
thickness of two and a half inches, in 
a rounded point, abrupt as that of one 
of the massier cacti ; and every part 
of the blunt sudden termination is 
thickly fretted over with the charac- 
teristic areolae. The slim tubular 
rootlets must have stuck out on every 
side from the obtuse rounded termi- 
nation of this underground stem, as 
we see, on a small scale, the leaflets 
of our larger club mosses sticking out 
from what are comparatively the 
scarce less abrupt terminations of 
their creeping stems and branches. 
In at least certain stages of growth 
the sub-aerial stems of Lepidodendron 
also terminated abruptly (see Fig. 24) ; and the only termi- 
nal point of Ulodendron I ever saw was nearly as obtuse as 
that of Stigmaria. 

I have been long desirous of acquainting myself with the 
true character of this latter plant (Ulodendron), but 
hitherto my labors have not been very successful. A speci- 
men of Ulodeyidron mi7ius, however, now on the table, 
which I disinterred several years ago from out a bed of 
ferruginous shale in the Water of Leith, a little above 
the village of Colinton, exhibits several i^eculiarities which, 
so far as I know, have not yet been described. Though 
rather less than ten inches in length by about three inches 
in breadth, it exhibits no fewer than seven of those round, 
beautifully sculptured scars, ranged rectilinearly along the 
trunk, by which this ancient genus is so remarkably charac- 




STIGMARIA. 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 467 

terized. It is covered with small, sharply relieved, obovate 
scales, most of them furnished with an apparent midrib, 
and with their edges slightly turned up ; from which 
peculiarities, and their great beauty, they seem suited to 
remind the architect of that style of sculpture adopted by 
Palladio from his master Yitruvius, when, in ornamenting 
the Corinthian and composite torus, he fretted it into 
closely imbricated obovate leaves. Tliese scales are ranged 
in elegant curves, not unlike those ornamental curves, — a 
feat of the turning-lathe, — which one sees roughening the 
backs of ladies' watches of French manufacture. My fossil 
exhibited, as it lay in the rock, what I never saw in any 
other specimen, — a true branch sticking out at an acute 
angle from the stem, and fretted with scales of a peculiar 
form, which in one little corner appear also on the main 
stem, but which differ so considerably from those of the 
obovate, apparently imbricated type, that, if found on a 
separate specimen, they might be held to indicate difference 
of species. It has been shown l,y Mjssrs. Lindley and 
Hutton, on the evidence of one of the specimens figured 
in the " Fossil Flora," that the line of circular scars so 
remarkable in this genus, and which is held to be the 
impressions made by a rectilinear range of almost sessile 
cones, existed in duplicate on each stem, — a row occurring 
on two of the sides of the jDlant directly opDOsite each 
other. The branch in my specimen struck off from one of 
the intermediate sides at right angles with the cones. We 
already know that these w^ere ranged in one plane ; nor, if 
the branches were ranged in one plane also, — certainly the 
disposition of branch which would consort best with such a 
disposition of cone, — would the arrangement be w^ithout 
example in the vegetable kingdom as it even now exists. 
" Our host," says the late Captain Basil Hall, in his brief 
description of the island of Java, " carried us to see a 



468 ON THE LESS KNOWN 

singular tree, which had been brought from Madagascar, 
called familiarly the Traveller's Friend^ Urania being, I 
believe, its botanic name. We found it to differ from most 
other trees in having all its branches in one plane, like the 
sticks of a fan or the feathers of a peacock's tail." I may 
further mention, that the specimen which showed me the 
abrupt cactus-like terminations of Ulodendron repeated the 
evidence of Messrs. Lindley and Hutton's specimen regard- 
ing the arrangement of the cone scars on opposite sides, 
and showed also that these scars ascended to within little 
more than an inch of the top of the plant. 

As there are cases in which the position of a fossil plant 
may add, from its bearing on geologic history, a threefold 
interest to the fossil itself, regarded simply as an organism, 
I may be permitted to refer to a circumstance already re- 
corded, that there was a well marked Bechera detected 
about two years ago by Dr. Macbean of Edinburgh, an 
accomplished naturalist and careful observer, in a thin 
argillaceous stratum, interposed, in the Queen's Park, 
between a bed of columnar basalt and a bed of trap-tuif, in 
the side of the eminence occupied atop by the ruins of St. 
Anthony's Chapel. The stratified bed in which it occurs 
seems, from its texture and color, to be composed mainly 
of trappean materials, but deposited and arranged in 
water ; and abounds in carbonaceous markings, usually in 
so imperfect a state of keeping that, though long known to 
some of the Edinburgh geologists, not a single species, or 
even genus, were they able to determine. All that could 
be said was, that they seemed fucoidal, and might of course 
belong to any age. The Bechera, however, shows that the 
deposit is one of the Lower Coal Measures. There was 
found associated with it a tooth of a Carboniferous Holop- 
tychins, wliose evidence bore out the same conclusion ; and 
both fossils derive au importance from the light which they 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 469 

throw on the age of the bed of tuff which underlies the 
stratum in which they occur. At least this trap-rock must 
be as old as the fossiliferous layer which rests upon it, or 
rather, as shown by its underlying position, a little older : 
it must be a trap of the earlier Carboniferous period. Fur- 
ther, it must have been, not injected among the strata, but 
poured out over the surface, — in all probability covered at 
the time by water ; and there must have formed over it, 
ere another overflow of trap took j^lace, a thin sedimentary 
bed charged with fragments of the plants of the period, 
and visited, when in the course of deposition, by some of 
its fishes. 

Even among the vegetable organisms of our Coal Meas- 
ures, already partially described and figured, much remains 
to be accomplished in the way of restoration. Portions of 
Sphenopteris bifida^ for instance, a fern of the Lower Car- 
boniferous rocks have been repeatedly figured ; but a beau- 
tiful specimen on the table, which exhibits what seems to 
be the complete frond of the plant, will give, I doubt not, 
fresh ideas respecting the general framework, if I may so 
speak, of this skeleton fern, to even those best acquainted 
Avith the figures ; and an elaborate restoration of its con- 
temporary, Sphenopteris affinis (see frontispiece) which I 
completed fi'om a fine series of specimens in my collection, 
will be new, as a whole, to those most familiar with this 
commonest of the Burdiehouse fossils. From comparisons 
instituted between minute portions of this Sphenopteris and 
a recent fern, it has been held considerably to resemble a 
Davallia of the West Indies ; whereas it will be seen from 
the entire frond that it was characterized by very striking 
peculiarities, exemplified, say some of our higher botanical 
authorities, to Avhom I have submitted my restoration, by 
no fern that now lives. The frond of Davallia Canarien- 
sls^ though luilike in its venation, greatly resembles in gen- 
40 



470 



ON THE LESS KNOWiq" 



eral outline one of the larger pinnae of Sphenopteris affiniSf 
but these pinnae form only a small part of the entire frond 




SPHENOPTERIS BIFIDA. 

{Burdiehouse,) 

of this Sphenopteris. It was furnished with a stout leafless 
rachis, or leaf-stalk, exceedingly similar m form to that of 
our common brake {Pteris aquilina). So completely, in- 
deed, did it exhibit the same club-like, slightly bent termi- 
nation, the same gradual diminution in thickness, and tho 
same smooth surface, that one accustomed to see this part 
of the bracken used as a thatch can scarce doubt that 
the stipes of Sphenopteris would have served the. purpose 



J 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 471 

equally well ; nay, that were it still in existence to be so 
employed, a roof thatched with it, on which the pinnae and 
leaflets were concealed, and only the club-like stems ex- 
l^osed, row above row, in the style of the fern-thatcher, 
could not be distinguished, so far as form and size went, 
from a roof thatched with brake. High above the club- 
like termination of the rachis the stem divided into two 
parts, each of which, a little higher up, also divided into 
two ; these in turn, in at least the larger fronds, also bifur- 
cated ; and this law of bifurcation, — a marked, mayhap 
unique, peculiarity in a fern, — regulated all the larger 
divisions of the frond, though its smaller pinnae and leaf- 
lets were alternate. It was a further peculiarity of the 
2)lant that, unHke the brake, it threw off, ere the main 
divisions of its rachis took place, two pinnae placed in the 
alternate order, and of comparatively small size. The 
frond of Sphenopteris bifida was of a more simple form 
than that of its larger congener, and not a little resembled 
a living fern of New Zealand, Ccenopteris vivipara. It 
was tripinnate; its secondary stems were placed directly 
opposite on the midrib, but its tertiary ones in the alter- 
nate arrangement ; and its leaflets which were also alter- 
nate, were as rectilhiear and slim as mere veins, or as the 
thread-like leaflets of asparagus. Like the fronds of Cce- 
nopteris when not in seed, it must have presented the 
appearance of the mere macerated framework of a fern. 
I need scarce remark that, independently of the scientific 
interest which must attach to restorations of these early 
plants, they speak powerfully to the imagination, and sup- 
ply it with materials from which to construct the vanished 
landscapes of the Carboniferous ages. From one such re- 
stored fern as the two now submitted to the Association, 
it is not difficult to pass in fancy to the dank slopes of 
the ancient land of the Lower Coal Measures, when they 



4:72 ON THE LESS KNOWN 

waved as thickly with graceful Sphenopteres as our exist- 
ing hill sides with the common brake; and when every 
breeze that rustled through the old forests bent in mimic 
waves theu- slim flexible stems and light and graceful 
foliage. 

In 1844, when Professor Nicol, of Marischal College, 
Aberdeen, appended to his interesting " Guide to the Ge- 
ology of Scotland," a list of the Scottish fossils known at 
the time, he enumerated only two vegetable species of the 
Scotch Oolitic system, — Equisetum columnar e and Pin- 
ites or Pence Eiggensis; the former one of the early 
discoveries of our distinguished President, Sir Roderick 
Murchison; the latter, of the late Mr. William Nicol of 
Edinburgh. Chiefly from researches' in the Lias of Eathie, 
near Cromarty, and in the Oolites of Sutherland and the 
Hebrides, I have been enabled to increase the list from 
two to rather more than fifty species, — not a great num- 
ber, certainly, regarded as the sole representative of a 
flora ; and yet it may be deemed comparatively not a very 
small one by such as may remember, that in 1837, when 
Dr. Buckland published the second edition of his " Bridge- 
water Treatise," Adolphe Brogniart had enumerated only 
seventy species of plants as occurring ui all the Secondary 
formations of Europe, from the Chalk to the Trias inclu- 
sive. In a paper such as the present I can of course do 
little more than just indicate a few of the more striking 
features of the Scottish flora of the middle Secondary 
ages. Like that of the period of the true Coal, it had 
its numerous coniferous trees. As shown by the fossil 
woods of Helmsdale and Eigg, old Oolitic Scotland, like 
the Scotland of three centuries ago, must have had its 
mighty forests of pine;* and in one respect these trees 

* Trees must have been very abundant in what is now Scotland in these 
Secondary ages. Trunks of the common Scotch fir are of scarce more 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 473 

seem to have more nearly resembled those of the recent 
pine forests of our coimtry than the trees of the coniferous 
forests of the remote Carboniferous era. For while we 
scarce ever find a cone associated with the coniferous 
woods of the Coal Measures, — Lindley and Hutton never 
saw but one from all the English coal fields, and Mr. Alex- 
ander Bryson of Edinburgh, only one from all the coal 
fields of Scotland, — tree-cones of at least four difierent 
species, more probably of five, are not rare in our Scottish 
deposits of the Lias and Oolite. It seems not improbable 
thnt in the Carboniferous genera Pinites, Pitus, and Ana- 
bathra, which appi'oach but remotely to aught that now 
exists, the place of the ligneous scaly cone may have been 
taken, as in the junipers and the yews, by a perishable 
berry ; while the Pines and Araucarians of the Oolite 
were, like their congeners in recent times, in reality conif- 
erous, that is, cone-bearing trees. It is another character- 
istic of these Secondary conifers, that while the woods of 

frequent occurrence in our mosses than the trunks of somewhat resembling 
trees among the shales of the Lower Oolite of Helmsdale. On examining 
in that neighborhood, about ten years since, a huge heap of materials 
wliich had been collected along the sea shore for burning into lime in a 
temporary kiln, I found that more than three fourths of the rvhole con- 
sisted of fragments of coniferous wood washed out of the shile beds by 
the surf, and the remainder of a massive Isastrea. And orly two years 
ago, after many kilnfuls had been gathered and burnt, his gvace the Duke 
of Argyll found that fossil wood could still be collected by cartloads along 
the shore of Helmsdale. The same woods also occur at Port Gower, Kin- 
tnidwcll, Shandwick, and Eathie. In the Island of Eigg, too, in an Oolite 
deposit, locked up in trap, and whose stratigraphical relations cannot in 
consequence be exactly traced, great fragments of Pinites Eiggensis are 
so aljundant, that, anned with a mattock, I have dug out of the rock, in 
a few minutes, specimens enough to supply a dozen of museums. In 
short, judging from its fossiliferous remains, it seems not improbable that 
ol.l Oolitic Scotland was as densely covered with coniferous trees as the 
Scotland of Roman times, when the great Caledonian forest stretched 
northwards from the Avail of Antoninus to the furthest Thule. 
40* 



474 ON THE LESS KNOWN 

the Palaeozoic periods exhibit often, like those of the trop- 
ics, none of the dense concentric lines of annual growth 
which mark the reign of winter, these annual lines are 
scarce less strongly impressed on the Oolitic woods than 
on those of Norway or of our own country m the present 
day. In some of the fossil trees these yearly rings are of 
great breadth; they seem to have sprung up in the rich 
soil of sheltered hollows and plains, and to have increased 
in diameter from half an inch to three quarters of an inch 
yearly ; while in other trees of the same species the yearly 
zones of growth are singularly narrow, — in some instances 
little more than half a hue in thickness. Rooted on some 
exposed hill side, in a shallow and meagre soil, they in- 
creased their diameter during the twelvemonth little more 
than a line in the severer seasons, and little more than 
an eighth part of an inch even when the seasons were 
most favorable. Further, whether the rings be large or 
small, we ordinarily find them occurring in the same speci- 
mens in groups of larger and smaller. In one of my 
Helmsdale specimens, indicative generally of rapid growth, 
there are four contiguous annual rings, which measure in 
all an inch and two twelfths across, while the four con- 
tiguous rings immediately beside them measure only half 
an inch. "If, at the present day," says a distinguished 
fossil botanist, " a warm and moist summer produces a 
broader annual layer than a cold and dry one, and if fos- 
sil plants exhibit such appearances as we refer in recent 
plants to a diversity of summers, then it is reasonable to 
suppose that a similar diversity formerly prevailed." The 
same reasoning is of course as applicable to groups of an- 
nual layers as to single annual layers ; and may we not ven- 
ture to infer from the almost invariable occurrence of such 
groups in the woods of this ancient system, that that ill- 
understood law of the weather which gives us in irregu- 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 



475 



lar succession groups of colder and Avarmer seasons, and 
whose operation, as Bacon tells us, was first remarked in 
the provinces of the Netherlands, was as certainly in ex- 
istence during the ages of the Oolite as at the present 
time ? 

Twigs which exhibit the foliage of these ancient conifers 
seem to be less rare in our Scotch deposits than in those n)f 

Fig. 130. 




CONIFERS ? 



England of the same age. My collection contains fossil 
sprigs, with the slim needle-like leaves attached, of what 



476 



ON THE LESS KNOWN 



seem to be from six to seven different species; and it is 
worthy of notice, that they resemble in the group rather 
the coniferae of the southern than those of the northern 
hemisphere. One sprig in my collection seems scarcely 
distinguishable from that of the recent Altinga excelsa; 
another, from that of the recent Altinga Cunningliami, 
Lii^dley and Hutton figure in theii* fossil flora a mmute 
branch of Dacrydium cupressinum^ in order to show how 
nearly the twigs of a large tree, from fifty to a hundred 
feet high, may resemble some of the " fossils referable to 
Lycopodiaceae." More than one of the Oolitic twigs in my 

Fig. 131. 




CONIFER TWIGS. 



collection are of a resembling character, and may have 
belonged either to cone-bearing trees or to club mosses. 
Respecting, however, the real character of at least one of 
the specimens, — a minute branch from the Lias of Eathie, 
with the leaflets attached, — there can be no mistake. The 
thicker part of the stem is in such a state of keeping, that 
it presents to the microscope, in a sliced preparation, the 
internal structure, and exhibits, as in recent coniferous 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 477 

twigs of a year's growth, a central pith, a single ring of 
reticulated tissue arranged in lines that radiate outwards, 
and a thin layer of enveloping bark. Nothing, then, can 
be more certain than that this ancient twig, which must be 
accepted as representative of the foliage of whole forests of 
the Secondary ages in Scotland, formed part of a conifer of 
the Lias ; and the foliage of several of the other twigs, its 
contemporaries, though I have failed to demonstrate their 
true character in the same way, bear a scarce less coniferous 
aspect. The cones of the period, from the circumstance 
that they are locked up in a hard limestone that clings 
closely around their scales, and from the further circum- 
stance that the semi-calcareous lignite into which they are 
resolved is softer and less tenacious than the enclosing 
matrix, present, when laid open, not their outer surfaces, 
but mere sections of their interior ; and give, in conse- 
quence, save in their general proportions and outline, but 
few specific marks by which to distinguish them. "We see, 
however, in some cases in these sections what would be 
otherwise unseen, — the flat naked seeds lying embedded in 
their hollow receptacles between the scales, and in as per- 
fect a state of keeping as the seeds of recent pines that had 
ripened only a twelvemonth ago. Had not the vitality of 
seeds its limits in time, like life of all other kinds, one 
might commit these perfect fossil germs to the soil, in the 
hope of seeing the old extinct forests called, through their 
agency, a second time into existence. Of three apparent 
species of cones which occur in the Eathie Lias, the smallest 
seems to have resembled in size and appearance that of the 
Scotch fir ; the largest, which consisted from bottom to 
top, as seen in section, of from nine to ten scales, appears to 
have been more in the proportions of the oblong oval cones 
of the spruce family ; while a cone of intermediate length, 
but of considerably greater breadth, assumed the rounded 



478 



ON THE LESS KNOWN 




Fig. 132. form of the cones of the cedar. 

I have found in the same deposit 
what seems to be the sprig of 
a conifer, with four apparently- 
embryo cones attached to it in 
the alternate order. These are 
rather more sessile than the young 
cones of the larch ; but the aspect 
of the whole is that of a larch 
twig in early summer, when the 
minute and tender cones, pos- 
sessed of all the beauty of flow- 
ers, first appear along its sides. 
Among conifers of the Pine and Araucarian type we 
mark the first appearance in this system, in at least Scot- 
land, of the genus Thuja. One of the Helmsdale plants 
of this genus closely resembles the common Arbor Vitae 
(Thuja occidentalis) of our gardens and shrubberies. It 
exhibits the same numerous slim, thick-clustered branch- 
lets, covered over by the same minute, sessile, scale-like 
leaves ; and so entirely reminds one of the recent Thuja, 
that it seems difficult to conceive of it as the member of a 
flora so ancient as that of the Oolite. But not a few of 
the Oolitic plants in Scotland bear this modern aspect. 
The great development of its Cycadaceaa, — an order un- 
known in our Coal Measures, — also forms a prominent 
feature of the Oolitic flora. One of the first known genera 
of this curious order, — the genus Pterophyllum, — appears 
in the Trias. It distinctively marks the commencement of 
the Secondary flora, and intimates that the once great Pa- 
laeozoic flora, after gradually waning throughout the Per- 
mian ages, and becoming extinct at their close, had been 
succeeded by a vegetation altogether new. At least one 
of the Helmsdale forms of this family is identical with a 




FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 



479 



Yorkshire species already named and figured, — Zamiapec- 
tinata : a well marked Zamia which occurs in the Lias of 
Eathie appears to be new. Its pinnate leaves were fur- 
nished with a strong woody midrib, so well preserved in 
the rock, that it yields its internal structure to the micro- 
Fig. 133. 




ZAMIA. 



scope. The ribbon-like pinnae or leaflets were rectilinear, 
retaining their full breadth until they united to the stem 
at right angles, but set somewhat awry 5 and, like several 



480 ON THE LESS KNOWN 

of "ihe recent Zamise, they were striped longitudinally with 




ZAMIA. 



cord-like lines. (Fig. 133.) Even the mode of decay of 
this Zamia, as shown by the abrupt termination of its leaf- 
lets, exactly resembled that of its existing congeners. (Fig. 
134.) The withered points of the pinnae of recent Zamise 
drop off as if clipped across with a pair of scissors ; and in 
fossil fronds of this Zamia of the Lias we find exactly the 
same clipped-like appearance. (Fig. 135.) Another Scotch 
Zamia (Fig. 136), which occurs in the Lower Oolite of 
Helmsdale, resembles the Eathie one in the breadth of its 
leaflets, but they are not wholly so rectilinear, diminishing 
slightly towards their base of attachment ; they are ranged, 
too, along the stem or midrib, not at a right angle, but at 
an acute one ; the line of attachment is not set awry, but 
on the general plane of the leaf; and the midrib itself is 
considerably less massive and round. A third species from 
the same locality bears a general resemblance to the latter ; 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 481 

but the leaflets are narrower at the base, and, as the print 

Fig. 135. 




indicates (Fig. 136), so differently attached to the stem, that 

Fig. 136 




from the pressure in the rock most of them have become 
41 



482 



ON THE LESS KNOWN 



detached; while yet a fourth species (Fig. 137), very closely 
resembles a Zamia of the Scarborough Oolite, — Z. lanceo- 
lata. The leaflets, however, contract much more suddenly 

Fig. 137. 




from their greatest breadth than those of lanceolata^ into 
a pseudo-footstalk; and the contraction takes place not 
almost equally on both sides, as in that species, but almost 
exclusively on the upper side. And so, provisionally at 
least, this Helmsdale Zamia may be regarded as specifically 
new. 

With the leaves of the Eathie Zamia, we find, in this 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 



483 



northern outlier of the Lias, cones of a peculiar form, 
which, like the leaves themselves, are still unfigured and 
undescribed, and some of which could scarce have be- 

Fig. 138. 




CONE. 



longed to any coniferous tree. In one of these (Fig. 138), 
the ligneous bracts or scales, narrow and long, and grad- 
ually tapering till they assume nearly the awl-shaped form, 
cluster out thick from the base and middle portions of the 
cone, and, like the involucral appendages of the hazel-nut, 
or the sepals of the yet unfolded rose-bud, sweep gracefully 
upwards to the top, where they present at their margins 
minute denticulations. In another species the bracts are 
broader, thinner, and more leaf-like : they rise, too, more 
from the base of the cone, and less from its middle por- 
tions ; so that the whole must have resembled an enormous 
bud, with strong woody scales, some of which extended 



4:84 ON THE LESS KNOWN 

from base to apex. The first described of these two spe- 
cies seems to have been more decidedly a cone than the 
other ; but it is probable that they were both constating 

Fiff. 139. 




links between such leathern seed-bearing flowers as we find 
developed in Cycas revoluta^ and such seed-bearing cones 
as we find exemplified in Zamia pungens. Tlie bud-like 
cone, however, does not seem to have been that of a Cyca- 
daceous plant, as it occupied evidently not a terminal posi- 
tion on the plant that bore it, like the cones of Zamia or 
the flowers of Cycas, but a lateral one, like the lateral 
flowers of some of the Cactus tribe. Another class of 
vegetable forms, of occasional occurrence in the Helmsdale 
beds, seems intermediate between the Cycadacese and the 
ferns : at least, so near is the approach to the ordinary 
fern outline, while retaining the stifl" ligneous character of 
2amia, that it is scarce less diflicult to determine to which 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLxVND. 



485 



Fig. 140. 




of the two orders of plants such organisms belonged, than 
to decide whether some of the slim graceful sprigs of 
foliage that occur in the rocks beside them belonged to 
the conifers or the club mosses 
And I am informed by Sir 
Charles Lyell, that (as some of 
the existing conifers bear a foli- 
age scarce distmguishable from 
that of Lycopodiaceas), so a re- 
cently discovered Zamia is fur- 
nished with fronds that scarce 
differ from those of a fern. Even 
Zamia pectinata may, as Stern- 
berg remarks, have been a fern. 
Lindley and Hutton place it 
merely provisionally among the 
Cycadaceoe, in deference to the judgment of Adolphe 
Brogniart, and point out its resemblance to Polypodiwm 
'pectinatmn ; and a small Helmsdale frond which I have 
placed beside it bears the impress of a character scarce loss 
equivocal. The flora of the Oolite was peculiarly a flora 
of intermediate forms. 

We recognize another characteristic of our Oolitic flora 
in its simj^le-leaved fronds, in some of the species not a 
little resembling those of the recent Scolopendrium, or 
Ilart's-Tongue fern, — a form regarded by Adolphe Brog- 
niart as peculiarly characteristic of his third period of 
vegetation. These simple ferns are, in the Helmsdale de- 
posits, of three distinct types. .There is first a lanceolate 
leaf, from tw^o and a half to three inches in length, of 
not unfrequent occurrence, which may have formed, how- 
ever, only one of the four leaflets, united by their pseudo- 
footstalks, which compose the frond of Glossopteris, — a 
distinctive Oolitic genus. There is next a simple ovate lan- 
41* 



486 



ON THE LESS KNOWN 



ceolate leaf, from four to five and a half inches in length, 
which in form and venation, and all save its thrice greater 



Fig. m. 




size, not a little resembles the leaflets of a Coal Measure 
neuropteris, — iV. acuminata. And, in the third place, 
there are the simple leaves tliat in general outline resem- 
ble, as I have said, the fronds of the recent Ilart's-Tongue 
fern i^Scolopendriimi vulgare)^ except that their base is lan- 
ceolate, not cordate. Of these last there are two kinds in 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 487 

the beds, representative of two several species, or, as their 
difference in general aspect and detail is very great, may- 
hap two several genera. The smaller of the two has a 
slender midrib, depressed on its upper side, and flanked on 
each side by a row of minute, slightly elongated protuber- 
ances, but elevated on the under side, and flanked by rows 
of small but well marked grooves, that curve outwards to 
the edges of the leaf. The larger resemble a Taeniopteris 
of the EngUsh and Continental Oolites, save that its midrib 
is more massive, its venation less at right angles with the 
stem, its base more elongated, and its size much greater. 
Some of the Helmsdale specimens are of gigantic propor- 
tions. From, however, a description and figure of a plant 
of evidently the same genus, — a Tseniopteris of the Vir- 
ginian Oolite, given by Professor W. B. Rogers of the 
United States, — I find that some of the American fronds 
are larger still. My largest leaf from Helmsdale must 
have been nearly five inches in breadth; and if its pro- 
l^ortions were those of some of the smaller ones of appa- 
rently the same species from the same locality, it must have 
measured about thirty inches in length. But fragments of 
American leaves have been found more than six inches in 
breadth, and whose length cannot have fallen short of forty 
inches. The Tseniopteris, as its name bears, is regarded as 
a fern. From, however, the leathern-like thickness of some 
of the Sutherland specimens, — from the great massiveness 
of their midrib, — from the rectilinear simplicity of their 
fibres, — and, withal, from, in some instances, their great 
size, — I am much disposed to believe that in our Scotch, 
mayhap also in the American species, it may have been the 
frond of some simple-leaved Cycas or Zamia. But the 
point is one which it must be left for the future satisfac- 
torily to settle ; though provisionally I may be permitted 
to regard these leaves as belonging to some Cycadaceous 



ASS 



ON THE LESS KNOWN 



plant, whose fronds, in their venation and form, resembled 
the simple fronds of Scolopendrium, just as the leaves of 



Fig. 142. 




some of its congeners resembled the fronds of the pinnate 
ferns. 

I have already referred to the close resemblance which 
certain Cycadaceous genera bear to certain of the fern 
family. In at least two sj^ecies of Pterophyllum, — JP, 
comi^tum and P, oninus^ — the divisions of the leaflets 
^eem little else than accidental rents in a simple fi'ond ; in 
P. Nelsoni they are apparently nothing more ; and similar 
divisions, evidently, however, the effect of accident, and 
less rounded at their extremities than in at least P. comp- 
ttwiy we find exhibited by some of the Helmsdale speci- 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 



489 



mens of Tseniopteris (See Fig. 142, p. 488.) But what- 
ever the nature of these simple fronds, they seem to impart 

Fig. 143. 




PECOPTERIS OBTUSIFOLIA. 



much of its peculiar character, all the world over, to the 
flora of the Oolitic ages. 

The compound ferns of the formation are numerous, 
and at least proportionally a considerable part of them 
seem identical in species with those of the Oolite of Eng- 
land. (See Fig. 143.) Among these there occur Pecopte- 
ris Whitbiensis, JPecopteris obtusifolia, Pecopteris insig- 
nis, — all well marked English species ; with several others. 
It has, besides, its apparent ferns, that seem to be new — 



490 



ON THE LESS KNOWN 



(Fig. 144) — tliat are at least not figured in any of the fossil 
floras to which I have access, — (Fig. 145), — such as a well 
defined Pachypteris, with leaflets broader and rounder than 



Fig. 144. 




Fig. 145. 




FACHYPTEEIS. 



the typical P. lanceolata^ and a much stouter midrib ; a 
minute Sphenopteris too, and what seems to be a Phle- 
bopteris, somewhat resembling P, propinqua^ but greatly 
more massive in its general proportions. The equisetacea 
we find represented in the Brora deposits by JEquisetum 
columnare^ — a plant the broken remains of which occur in 
great abundance, and which, as was remarked by our Pres- 
ident many years ago, in his paper on the Sutherlandshire 
Oolite, must have entered largely into the composition of 
the bed of lignite known as the Brora Coal. We find 
associated with it what seems to be the last of the Cala^ 
mites, — Calamites arenaceus^ — a name, however, which 
seems to have been bestowed both on this Oolitic plant 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 491 

and a resembling Carboniferous species. The deposit has 
also its Lycopodites, though, from their resemblance in 
foliage to the conifers, there exists that difficulty in draw^ 

Fig. 146. 




PHLEBOPTERIS. 



ing the line between them to which I have already ad, 
verted. One of these, however, so exactly resembles a 
lycopodite of both the Virginian and Yorkshire Oolite, — 
L. uncifolms^^ — that I cannot avoid regarding it as specifi- 
cally identical ; and it seems more than doubtful whether 
the stem which I have placed among the conifers is not a 
lycopodite also. It exhibits not only the general outline 
of the true club moss, but, like the fossil club mosses too, 
it wants that degree of ligniferous body in the rock which 
the coniferous fossils almost always possess. Yet another 
of the organisms of the deposit seems to have been either 
a lycopodite or a fern. Its leaflets are exceedingly minute, 




492 ONTHELESSKNOWN 

and set alternately on a stem slender as a hair, — circum- 
stances in which it resembles some of the tiny lycopodites 
Fig. 147. of the tropics, such as Lycopodium apo- 

dium. I must mention, however, that 
the larger plant of the same beds which 
I have placed beside it, and which resem- 
bles it so closely that my engraver finds 
it difficult to indicate any other difference 
between them than that of size, appears 
to be a true fern, not a lycopodium. To 
yet another vegetable organism of the 
system, — an organism which must be 
regarded, if I do not mistake its charac- 
ter, as at once very interesting and ex- 
traordinary, occurring as it does so low in the scale, and 
bearing an antiquity so high, — I shall advert, after a pre- 
liminary remark on a general characteristic of the flora to 
which it belongs, but to which it seems to furnish a striking 
exception. 

From the disappearance of many of those anomalous 
types of the Coal Measures which so puzzle the botanist, 
and the extensive introduction of types that still exist, we 
can better conceive of the general features and relations of 
the flora of the Oolite than of those of the earlier floras. 
And yet the general result at which we arrive may be 
found not without its bearing on the older vegetations 
also. Throughout almost all the families of this Oolitic 
flora, there seems to have run a curious bond of relation- 
ship, which, like those ties which bound together some of 
the old clans of our country, united them, high and low, 
into one great sept, and conferred upon them a certain 
wonderful unity of character and appearance. Let us as- 
sume the ferns as our central group. Though less abun- 
dant than in the earlier creation of the Carboniferous 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND 



403 



system, they seem to have occupied, judging from their 
remains, very considerable space in the Oolitic vegetation ; 
and with the ferns there were associated in great abun- 
dance the two prevailing families of the Pterides, — Equi- 
seta and Lycopodia, — plants which, in most of our modern 
treatises on the ferns proper, take their place as the fern 
allies. (See Fig. 148.) Let us place these along two of the 
sides of a pentagon, — the Lycopodia on the right side of 

Fig. 148. 




Ferns. 

the ferns, the Eqniseta on the left ; further, let ns occupy 
the two remaining sides of the figure by the Coniferse and 
the CycadacesB, — placing the Coniferse on the side next 
the Lycopodia, and the Cycadaceae, as the last added key- 
stone of the erection, between these and the Equiseta. 
And now, let us consider how very curious the Unks are 
which give a wonderful unity to the whole. We still find 
great difficulty in distinguishing between the foliage of 
some of even the existing club mosses and the conifers; 
and the ancient Lepidodendra are very generally recog- 
nized as of a type intermediate between the two. Similar 
Intel-mediate types, exemplified by extinct families, united 
the conifers and the ferns. The analogy of Kirchneria 
with the ThinnfekUa^ says Dr. Braim, is very remarkable, 
42 



494 



ON THE LESS KNOWN 



notwithstanding that the former is a fern, and that the lat. 
ter is ranked among conifers. The points of resemblance 
borne by the conifers to the huge Equiseta of the Oolitic 
period seem to have been equally striking. The pores 
which traverse longitudinally the channelled grooves by 
which the stems of our recent Equiseta are so delicately 
fluted, are said considerably more to resemble the discs of 



Fig. 149. 




IMBRICATED STEM. 

{Helmsdale.) 



pines and araucarians than ordinary stomata. Mr. Francis 
does not hesitate to say, in his work on British Ferns, that 
the relation of this special family to the Coniferae is so 
strong, both in external and internal structure, that it is 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 



495 



not without some hesitation he places them among the fern 
allies ; and it has been ascertained by Mr. Dawes, in his 
researches regarding the calamite, that in its internal struc- 
ture this apparent representative of Equiseta in the earlier 
ages of the world united " a network of quadrangular tis- 
sue similar to that of Coniferge to other quadrangular cells 
arranged in perpendicular sei'ies," Hke the cells of plants 
of a humbler order. The relations of the Fig. 150. 
Cycadacean order to ferns on the one hand, 
and to the Coniferse on the other, are equally 
well marked. As in the ferns, the venation 
of its fronds is circinate, or scroll-like, — they 
have in several respects a resembling structure, 
— in at least one recent species they have a 
nearly identical form ; and fronds of this fern- 
like type seem to have been comparatively 
common during the times of the Oolite. On 
the other hand, the Cycadaceae manifest close 
relations to the conifers. Both have their 
seeds originally naked ; both are cone-bearing ; 
both possess discs on the sides of their cellules ; 
and in both, in the transverse section, these 
cellules are subhexagonal, and radiate from a 
centre. Such were the very curious relations 
that united into one great sept the prevailing 
members of the Oolitic flora ; and similar bonds 
of connection seem to have eidsted in the floras 
of the still earlier ages. {Helmsdale.) 

In the Oolite of Scotland I have, however, at length 
found trace of a vegetable organism that seems to have 
lain, if I may so express myself, outside the pentagon, and 
was not a member of any of the great families which it 
comprised. (See Fig, 151.) I succeeded about four years 
ago in disinterring from the limestone of Helmsdale \s hat 



496 



ON THE LESS KNOWN 



appears to be a true dicotyledonous leaf, with the frag- 
ment of another leaf, which I at first supposed might have 
belonged to a plant of the same great class, but which I 
now find might have been a portion of a fern. When 
Phlehopteris Phillipsii was first detected in the Oolite of 
Yorkshire, Lindley and Hutton, regarding it as dicotyledo- 
nous, originated their term Dictyophillum as a general one 
for all such leaves. But it has since been assigned to a 
greatly lower order, — the ferns ; and Sir Charles Lyell has 

Fig. 151 




kindly shown me that an exotic fern of the present day 
exhibits exactly such a reticulated style of venation as my 
Helmsdale fragment. (See Fig. 152, p. 497.) The other 
leaf, however, though also fragmentary, and but indiffer- 
ently preserved, seems to be decidedly marked by the 
dicotyledonous character ; and so I continue to regard it, 
provisionally at least, as one of tlie first precursors in Scot- 
land of our great forest trees, and of so many of our llower- 
ing and fruit-bearing plants, and as apparently occupying 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 



497 



the same relative place in advance of its contemporaries as 
that occupied by the conifer of the Old Red Sandstone in 
advance of the ferns and Lycopodaceae with which I found 
it associated. In the arrangement of its larger veins the 
better preserved Oolitic leaf somewhat resembles that of the 
buckthorn ; but its state of keeping is such that it has j 
failed to leave its exterior outline in the stone. 

One or two general remarks, in conclusion, on the Oolite 
flora of Scotland may be permitted me by the Association. 

Fig. 152. 




In its aspect as a whole it greatly resembles the Oolite flora 
of Virginia, though separated in space from the locality in 
which the latter occurs by a distance of nearly four thou- 
sand miles. There are several species of plant? common to 

42* 



498 ON THE LESS KNOWN 

both, such as Equisetum columnare^ Catamites arenaceiis^ 
Pecopteris Whitbiensis, Lycopodites iincifolius^ and ap- 
parently Tceniopteris magnifolia; both, too, manifest tlie 
great abundance in which they were developed of old by 
the beds of coal into which their remains have been con- 
verted. The coal of the Virginia Oolite has been profit- 
ably wrought for many years : it is stated by Sir Charles 
Lyell, who carefully examined the deposit, and has given 
us the results of his observation in his second series of 
Travels in the United States, that the annual quan- 
tity taken from the Oolitic pits by Philadelphia alone 
amounted to ten thousand tons ; and though, on the other 
hand, the Sutherlandshire deposit has never been profitably 
wrought, it has been at least wrought more extensively than 
any other in the British Oolite. The seam of Brora,vary- 
ing from three feet three to three feet eight inches in thick- 
ness, furnished, says Sir Roderick Murchison, between the 
years 1814 and 1826, no less than seventy thousand tons of 
coal. Such is its extent, too, that nearly thirty miles from 
the pit's mouth (in Ross-shire under the Northern Sutor) I 
have found it still existing, though in, diminished propor- 
tions, as a decided coal seam, which it must have taken no 
small amount of vegetable matter to form. And almost on 
the other side of the world, nearly five thousand miles from 
the Sutherland beds, and more than eight thousand miles 
from the Carolina ones, the same OoHtic flora again appears, 
associated with beds of coal. At Nagpur in Central India 
the Oolitic Sandstones abound in simple fronded ferns, such 
as Taeniopteris and Glossopteris, and has its Zamites, its 
coniferous leaves, and its equisetaceae. 

Compared with existing floras, that of our Scottish Oolite 
seems to have most nearly resembled the flora of New Zea- 
land, — a flora remarkable for the great abundance of its 
ferns, and its vast forests of coniferous trees, that retain at 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 499 

all seasons their coverings of acicular spiky leaves. It is 
to this flora that Dacrydhmi ciiiyressimmi^ — so like a club 
moss in its foliage, — belongs ; and Podocarpus ferru- 
gineus^ — a tree which more closely resembles in its foliage 
the Eathie conifer, save that its spiky leaves are somewhat 
narrower and longer than any other with which I am ac- 
quainted. About two thirds of the plants which cover the 
plains, or rise on the hill-sides of that country, are crypto- 
gamic, consisting mainly of ferns and their allies ; and it is 
a curious circumstance, — which was, however, not without 
precedent in the merely physical conditions of the Oolitic 
flora of Scotland, — that so shallow is the soil even where 
its greatest forests have sprung up, and so immediately 
does the rock lie below, that the central axes of the trees 
do not elongate downwards into a tap, but throw out hori- 
zontally on every side a thick network of roots, which rises 
so high over the surface as to render walking through the 
woods a difiicult and very fatiguing exercise. The flora of 
the Oolite, like that of New Zealand, seems to have been 
in large part cryptogamic, consisting of ferns and the allied 
horse-tail and club moss families. Its forests seem to have 
contained only cone-bearing trees; at least among the 
many thousand specimens of its fossil woods which have 
been examined, no tissue of the true dicotyledonous char- 
acter has yet been found; and with the exception of the 
leaves just described, all those yet found in the System, 
which could have belonged to true trees, are of the acicu- 
lar form common to the Conifera3, and show in their dense 
ligneous structure that they were persistent, not deciduous. 
Xor is there evidence wanting that many of the Conifera? 
of the period grew in so shallow a soil, that their tap-roots 
were flattened and bent backwards, and they were left to 
derive their sole support, like the trees of the New Zealand 
forests, from such of then* roots as shot out horizontally. 



500 ON THE LESS KNOWN 

W^e even know the nature of the rock upon which they 
rested. As shown by fragments still locked up among the 
interstices of their petrified roots, it was an Old Red flag- 
stone similar to that of Caithness in the neighborhood of 
Wick and Thurso, and containing the same fossil remains. 
In the water-rolled pebbles of the Conglomerate of Helms- 
dale and Port Gower, — pebbles encrusted by Oolitic cor- 
als, and enclosed in a calcareous paste, containing Oolitic 
belemnites and astres8, — I have found the well marked 
fishes and fucoids of the Old Red Sandstone. As shown 
by the appearance of the rounded masses in which these 
lay, they must have presented as ancient an appearance in 
the times of the Lower Oolite as they do now ; and the 
glimpse which they lent of so remote an antiquity, through 
the medium of an antiquity which, save for the comparison 
which they furnished the means of instituting, might be 
well deemed superlatively remote, I have felt singularly 
awe-inspiring and impressive. Macaulay anticipates a time 
when the traveller from some distant land shall take his 
stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to survey the 
ruins of St. Paul's. In disinterring from amid the antique 
remains of the Oolite the immensely more antique remains 
of the Old Red Sandstone, I have felt as such a traveller 
would feel if, on setting himself to dig among the scattered 
heaps for memorials of the ruined city, he had fallen on 
what had been once the Assyrian Gallery of the British 
Museum, and had found mingling with the antiquities of 
perished London the greatly older and more venerable 
antiquities of Nineveh or of Babylon. The land of the 
Oolite in this northern locality must have been covered by 
a soil which, — except that from a lack of the boulder clays 
it must have been poorer and shallower, — must have not 
a little resembled that of the lower plains of Cromarty, 
Caithness, and Eastern Ross. And on this Palaeozoic plat- 



FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. 501 

form, long exposed, as the Oolitic Conglomerates abun- 
dantly testify, to denuding and disintegrating agencies, — a 
platform beaten by the surf where it descended to the sea 
level, and washed in the interior by rivers, with here a tall 
hill or abrupt precipice, and there a flat plain or sluggisli 
morass, — there grew vast forests of cone-bearing trees, 
tangled thickets of gigantic equisetacese, numerous forms 
of Cycas and Zamia, and wide-rolling seas of fern, amid 
whose open spaces club mosses of extinct tribes sent forth 
their long, creeping stems, spiky and dry, and thickly mot- 
tled with pseudo-spore-bearing catkins. 

The curtain drops over this ancient flora of the Oolite in 
Scotland ; and when, long after, there is a corner of the 
thick enveloping screen withdrawn, and we catch a partial 
gUmpse of one of the old Tertiary forests of our country, 
all is new. Trees of the high dicotyledonous class, allied 
to the plane and the buckthorn, prevail in the landscape, 
intermingled, however, with dingy funereal yews ; and the 
ferns and equisetae that rise in the darker openings of the 
wood approach to the existing type. And yet, though 
eons of the past eternity have elapsed since we looked out 
upon Cycas and Zamia, and the last of the Calamites, the 
time is still early, and long ages must lapse ere man shall 
arise out of the dust, to keep and to dress fields waving 
with the productions of yet another and difierent flora, and 
to busy himself with all the labor which he taketh under 
the sun. Our country, in this Tertiary time, has still its 
great outbursts of molten matter, that bury in fiery deluges 
many feet in depth, and many square miles in extent, the 
debris of wide tracts of woodland and marsh ; and the 
basaltic columns still form in its great lava bed ; and ever 
and anon, as the volcanic agencies awake, clouds of ashes 
darken the heavens, and cover up the landscape as if with 
accumulated drifts of a protracted snow storm. Who shall 



502 ON THE LESS KNOWN, ETC. 

declare what, throughout these long ages, the history of 
creation has been? We see at wide intervals the mere 
fragments of successive floras; hut know not how what 
seem the blank interspaces were filled, or how, as extinction 
overtook in succession one tribe of existences after another, 
and species, like individuals, yielded to the great law of 
death, yet other species were brought to the birth, and 
ushered upon the scene, and the chain of being was main- 
tained unbroken. We see only detached bits of that green 
web which has covered our earth ever since the dry land 
first appeared ; but the web itself seems to have been 
continuous throughout all time; though ever as breadth 
after breadth issued from the creative loom, the pattern 
has altered, and the sculpturesque and graceful forms that 
illustrated its first beginnings and its middle spaces have 
yielded to flowers of richer color and blow, and fruits of 
fairer shade and outline ; and for gigantic club mosses 
stretching forth their hirsute arms, goodly trees of the 
Lord have expanded their great boughs ; and for the 
barren fern and the calamite, clustering in thickets beside 
the waters, or spreading on flowerless hill slopes, luxuriant 
orchards have yielded their ruddy flush, and rich harvests 
their golden gleam. 



THE END, 



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MIJLLER'S FOOT-PItlNTS OF THE CMEATOR; or, the Asterolepis 
of Stromness, with numerous Illustrations. With a Memoir of the Author, by 
Louis Agassiz. 12mo, cloth, 1.75. 

MIJOJOER'S FIJRST IMPRESSIONS OF ENGIA.NI) AND ITS 
FEOFLE. With a fine Engraving of the Author. 12mo, cloth, 1.50. 

MILLER'S HEADSETIF OF CHRIST, and the Rights of the Christian 
People, a Collection of Personal Portraitures, Historical and Descriptive 
Sketches and Essays, with the Author's celebrated Letter to Lord Brougham. 
By Hugh Miller. Edited, with a Preface, by Petek Bayne, A. M. 12mo, 
cloth, 1.75. 

MILLER'S OLD RED SANDSTONE ; or, New Walks in an Old Field. 
Illustrated with Plates and Geological Sections. New Edition, Revised 
AND MUCH Enlarged, by the addition of new matter and new Illustrations, 
&c. 12mo, cloth, 1.75. 

MILLER'S FOPULAR GEOLOGY ; With Descriptive Sketches from a 
Geologist's Portfolio. By Hugh Miller. With a Resume of the Progress 
of Geological Science during the last two years. By Mrs. Miller. 12mo, 
cloth, 1.75. 

MILLER'S SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS ; or, the Story of my 
Education. An AuxoRiOGRArHY. With a full-length Portrait of the Author. 
12rao, 1.75. 

MILLER'S TALES AND SKETCHES. Edited, with a Preface, &c., by 
Mrs. Miller. 12mo, 1.50. 

Among the subjects are: Recollections of Ferguson — Burns — The Salmon 
Fischer of Udoll — The Widow of Dunskaith — The Lykewake — Bill Whyte-^ 
The Young Surgeon — George Ross, the Scotch Ag'ent — M'Culloch, the Mech- 
anician — A True Story of the Life of a Scotch Merchant of the Eighteenth 
Century. 

FILLER'S TESTIMONY OF THE ROCKS; or. Geology in its Bear- 
ings on the two Theologies, Natural and Revealed. " Thou shalt be in league 
with the stones of the field."— Job. With numerous elegant Illustrations. 
One volume, royal 12mo, cloth, 1.75. 

HUGH MILLER'S WORKS. Ten volumes, uniform style, in an elegant 
box, embossed cloth, 17 ; library sheep, 20 ; half calf, 34; antique, 34. 

W^CAZTLAY ON SCOTLAND. A Critique from Hugh Millers '^Wit- 
ncss." IGmo, flexible cloth. 37 cts. 

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